The Stranger I Am
by Cyberwraith9
Summary: In the wake of a terrible loss, Connie struggles to cope with the new changes in her life and herself. And along the way, she might have to save the world from the invasion of Shard and her rebel Gems. It's going to be a busy summer! (Cover art by MJStudioArts) The sequel to The Stranger In Me!
1. Wake Up

_Cover by MJStudioArts_

"Connie? It's time to wake up."

Rolling onto her side, Connie pulled her face out of her pillow and cracked one eyelid. The light of a summer morning stabbed her in the pupil, too bright even through her room's closed blinds and drawn curtains. Connie groaned and clapped her palm over her eye, feeling her aching and fuzzy head throb. "Mmgnh?" she groaned in the direction of the doorway. "Whhtihmizit?"

"Good morning," her mother answered. "Though in about an hour, that would be 'good afternoon.' You should get up and eat something."

Not so long ago, the words would have been an instruction, not a suggestion. That tiny change in their dynamic probably said more about Connie's pitifulness than anything else. Connie rolled back onto her face and grumbled, ""Mmnnnodunghry."

The springs in her mattress creaked, and her bed shifted with her mother's weight next to her. A hand gently stroked her long, knotted hair. "I know you're not, but you need to eat anyway. You need to get out of your room." Sounds of delicate sniffing filled a short beat, and then her mother added, "And you also need to take a shower."

"Ayyyygnowwwww…"

A long sigh feathered the back of Connie's head. "I have to leave for my shift soon. Come downstairs and eat something in front of me so I know you got something in your stomach today." A light kiss pressed into Connie's scalp through her hair before her mother's weight creaked off the bed. "Blech. But first: shower."

Footsteps padded out of the room. After a quiet hesitation, the door creaked shut. It wasn't until her mother's footsteps had faded down the stairs that Connie managed to roll off her face and onto her back. The ceiling stared back at her, empty and blank.

Connie knew her parents were worried about her. She knew they had good reason to be worried. It had been eight days since the Battle of Ascension, which was an overly dramatic name for what had amounted to a scuffle between a handful of Gems on an abandoned mountaintop, but since the "Scuffle of Ascension" sounded even goofier, she stuck with the first name. In those eight days, Connie had cried, and raged, and remembered, and had spent sleepless nights plumbing the corners of her own mind for signs of non-Connie thoughts or feelings. But she had found nothing. And after the pain of loss had faded, she felt nothing.

Well, not nothing-nothing, _per se_. But her emotions had cooled and congealed into a lifeless, colorless blob that hung on her like an anchor. With this invisible blob weighing her down, it felt harder to move or think. She was sleeping more, sometimes for an entire day, only to wake up exhausted.

She didn't want to worry her parents, but she didn't know how to make things better. She didn't know if she could feel better anymore. And that should have worried her too. But it couldn't. The feeling-blob didn't do worry. It only did heavy.

Taking a long, deep breath, Connie choked, and agreed with her mother one at least one point: she needed a shower. She rolled until her feet struck carpet and then shambled toward her bathroom.

While the shower water heated up, Connie peeled out of her pajamas, which smelled almost as bad as she did. Before she had turned thirteen, the idea of becoming a teenager had seemed like a grand transformation of maturity, wisdom, and feminine mystique on the horizon. Now that she had reached it, the reality of it seemed to be mostly sweating.

Cradling her pajama shirt, Connie stared at the cheery yellow star ironed into its pink fabric. Steven never seemed sweaty. Even after a hard training session, he didn't really _sweat_ as much as _glow_.

The pajama shirt had been one of his numberless everyday shirts, borrowed from his wardrobe and never returned. Beneath her own funk, Connie could still detect a hint of sea spray and powdered sugar that Steven always seemed to smell like. She started to put the shirt in the bathroom's laundry hamper, but then paused, and tossed it onto the counter instead. It still had a little bit of its comforting magic left in it before the next wash. And as fitfully as she'd slept while wearing the shirt, she was afraid of how badly she might sleep without it.

By the time she finished sluicing off her teenage stank, the bathroom was thick with steam. She climbed out of the shower with her towel wrapped around herself and another towel wrapping up her wet, tangled mass of hair. As her hands moved on autopilot, brushing her teeth and rolling on deodorant, she realized that she did feel the tiniest bit lighter. Being clean, feeling clean, made a bigger difference than she'd thought.

Then she found herself holding her blow dryer as she tilted the towel wrapping off her head. The instant it turned on, blasting her face with warm air, she felt her stomach clench and dropped the dryer, jerking back. It clattered to rest on the counter with a steady stream of air belching from its nozzle.

She stared at the hairdryer, its electric whirr filling the room. Even as she fought the impulse, her stare was drawn up to the broad mirror above the sink. She tried not to look, but the fight was hopeless, and she knew it. Her gaze came to rest on the muddied reflection lurking under the thick, runny fog clinging to the mirror. A flash of color peered back at her through the fog, and even though she begged herself not to, she wiped the condensation from the mirror.

In her smeared reflection, Connie saw the square shape of the gemstone beneath her throat, its rounded sides peeking out from the top of her towel wrap. Its deep green color glimmered back at her with the rise and fall of her breathing. When she reached up to grip the stone, she could feel it still firmly rooted to her sternum, its boxy shape resisting her pull.

 _"I had been working on a farewell gift, but assumed I would have more time. It was almost complete, but now… Well, perhaps you will find it and finish it for me."_

Connie stared at the stone, the only remains of Jade. She had spent days tearing apart her room to find whatever gift the Gem had mentioned. She had looked through every file on her computer. And when nothing new had revealed itself, she had been forced to conclude that the gemstone was the only thing left behind. That, and her own body, free of the corruption Jade had taken with her when she had given up her physical form.

Whole and healthy, Connie had been given a second lease on life. Connie had defied all odds, and even her own promises to Jade, and had come through their shared ordeal intact. And Connie couldn't feel more miserable for the accomplishment.

Twisting away from the mirror, Connie jerked the hairdryer's plug from the wall, stilling its warm wind. She dressed and left the bathroom with a tangle of wet hair at her back and the dryer resting in a puddle of her towel on the floor.

Her mother waited for her in the kitchen, already dressed for work and wearing her lab coat. There was a plate of toast with jelly and a bowl of fresh fruit on the table next to a glass of orange juice, all of it for Connie. As Connie sat down, she saw her mother surreptitiously set aside a hairbrush at the sight of her daughter's soggy hair and try to hide a look of worry.

"Thanks, Mom," Connie mumbled. She took a bite of the toast and forced herself to swallow. The bite crawled down her throat like a centipede made of sandpaper.

A little smile crossed her mother's lips. "Much better," she said, and nodded. Then, pretending to remember, she grabbed a brown cardboard box off the countertop, clearly placed there so she could present it as soon as Connie arrived. "Oh, and we got a package this morning too," she said, and slid the box across the table to Connie.

Grateful for an excuse to ignore her breakfast, Connie pulled the box closer. The tape was already broken, so she pulled the top of the box apart. Inside she found two short stacks of paperback books, their covers old-timey and featuring words like _Classics_ and _Canon_. "Books?" she said.

"We got your summer reading list from the school's website and ordered them from Bookézoid. The minimum requirement was to just read three off the list, but your father and I figured you for an advanced reader." A twinkle lit her eye as she peered down into the box and added, "But I thought I saw something odd at the bottom…"

Connie slid the books apart and saw a sliver of something dark and starry at the very bottom of the box. Finding an edge with her fingers, she pulled it out to reveal a glossy pamphlet. It had a picture of a starfield surrounding a NASA logo, and was headed with two words that made Connie's eyes huge as she read them aloud. "Space Camp?"

When she looked up, her mother had a coy smile waiting for her. "How did that get in there? It must be a mistake," she said, her tone too serious to be genuine.

An old excitement flickered briefly inside of Connie as she stared at the pamphlet. "But you always said I was too young," Connie insisted, hardly daring to believe that her mother wasn't playing a joke on her, as unlikely a thing as her mother pranking anyone might be.

"Well, no matter how much I don't like it, you keep insisting on getting older," her mother said. The tiniest of cracks appeared in her façade, and she admitted, "And your father and I both agree that you can handle a lot more than we ever realized. We think you're mature enough to spend two weeks getting sick in a centrifuge if that's what you really want."

Connie fought to keep her own smile intact. "Thanks, Mom," she heard herself say.

Composure returning, her mother tapped the cardboard box. "But that pamphlet's at the bottom of your reading list, understand? Once you've finished those books, we will all sit down and talk about what happens next."

"That seems perfectly reasonable," Connie said, nodding sagely as she pretended to agree.

Her mother gave her a long, searching look, but then nodded in return. She collected her purse and keys, and then hesitated. Stepping close, she planted a long, lingering kiss in Connie's wet hair. "I love you, Connie. Call me if you need anything. Okay?"

"I will. I love you, Mom." Connie rose and hugged her mother tightly. And she even managed to keep her smile in place until her mother closed the front door from the other side. Once the lock clicked, though, her mouth sagged again.

Releasing a long, stale breath, Connie dropped back into her chair and looked at the pamphlet again. Not that long ago she would have relished the chance to train with real astronauts, to be trusted to spend two whole weeks away from home with no parental supervision. Even before she had met the Gems, Space Camp had been one of her big dreams.

Now, though, any joy from the notion felt like a betrayal. How could she think about playing space explorer after a real space explorer had given up everything for her? The memories of excitement and longing for something so terrestrial now felt like a child's foolish wish.

Shaking away the memories, Connie drew the first book out of the box. If she couldn't escape the childishness of her old dreams or the misery of the present, she could eat least bury it all under some school-approved literature. " _Frankenstein_? Again?" she groused as she read the cover. Then, opening to the copyright page, she brightened. "Ooh, it's the 1818 Edition! Missus Braeburn probably wants to teach the 1831 Edition in class." Since she had already read the later edition, it at least put her ahead of next year's studies.

She flipped to the first page and picked up her orange juice, determined to consume something if only for her mother's sake. But when the glass reached her lips, she paused, setting it aside to frown at the page. As soon as her eyes focused on the words, the text felt immediately familiar to her.

She started back at the first line, but as she tried to read each sentence, a sense of impatience overwhelmed her. She already knew the words. Shaking her head, she flipped to the next set of pages and continued, wondering if the two editions were actually that similar. They must have been, because as soon as her eyes focused, she realized that she already knew these pages too. Every word on the paper was as familiar to her as though she'd written them herself in that very moment.

Had she actually read this version of _Frankenstein_ before instead of the later version? Even if she had, it had been years since she had picked up the book, and as good as Shelley's work was, she didn't remember it leaving such a lasting impression on her before. But as she flipped from page to page, she could hardly focus on the words before she realized that she knew them all by heart.

In little more than a minute, Connie flipped past the final page and close the book. She must have been mistaken about which edition she already owned. "I hope Mom isn't too mad about buying the same book twice," she said, and pushed it aside. Then she selected the next book: _Pride and Prejudice_ , a book she definitely had never read. With a sigh, she cracked the book, resigning herself to getting through the toughest read first so the rest weren't so bad by comparison.

But as soon as her eye focused on the page, she realized that she knew these words too. Connie's frown deepened as she flipped from page to page, confused by her own recognition. The last time she had tried reading Jane Austen, it had been like trapping her brain inside a cage of itchy banality, and so she had sworn the author off. Now, though, as she skimmed through each page, it was as though she had memorized Elizabeth Bennet's high-society tribulations.

She shut the book and closed her eyes, trying to remember what came next. If she had really read Pride and Prejudice before, she would remember how it ended, wouldn't she? But as she strained to remember, she could only recall the events of the book up to the chapter she had just been reading. Everything before that, she could remember perfectly, but what came next was a mystery.

So she opened the book again and continued skimming. And as she moved from page to page, she realized that she did remember what happened. A minute later she closed the book on Elizabeth's and Mister Darcy's happy ending, bored and frustrated with their wishy-washiness, and recalling every single word of it. Had she really read it before and forgotten, only remembering now as she skimmed through it?

Then, with a spark of realization, she quickly drew the next book, a biography of Carl Sagan assigned as optional reading for her science class. She didn't normally read biographies, and knew for a fact that she had never read it before. And yet, as she flipped to each new page, she felt as though she already knew it.

But that wasn't it. Instead, she realized, Connie was reading each page as quickly as she could focus her eyes. Even without consciously examining the words, her mind was absorbing the text instantly upon seeing it. Before her toast had gone cold, Connie finished reading the entire box of books. She could recall every word of every page, and with just a moment's concentration, she could recite it back to herself without looking. She could count how many apostrophes and commas appeared in each book, and compare the number of each per page, per book, or total their numbers together, or compile a ratio of consonants to vowels, or—

She shook her head and backed out of her chair, sending it skidding across the kitchen floor. Staring at the pile of books on the table, she realized that she had just internalized her entire summer reading list in the time it would have taken any other student to finish a chapter. It was an impossible feat…for a human.

Reaching up, Connie touched the stone under her blouse. The first night she had awoken, Jade had read Connie's entire library: two full bookcases with shelves stacked two volumes deep. This new rapid speed-reading of hers seemed similar, though she'd never really been awake for any of the Gem's reading. But what did it mean that she could remember all of the books perfectly? She didn't remember anything else from the morning in that kind of detail. Would that change? Would she start remembering things she had forgotten?

She had blown Steven off his own porch with an accidental wind the night Jade had…left. But nothing had happened since. And she remembered the event like a normal memory, not like a new-book-eidetic memory. But would that change? Would her old memories start crystalizing like the books were now? Would there be room in her brain for all of it? Would she remember being a baby, or being born? Would she remember memories that weren't hers?

A tinkling sound ripped her out of her mental spiral. She looked to the corner of the kitchen and saw the wind chime strung up above the counter swaying in the still air. The three notes of the chime rang in chaotic, atonal succession. A breeze tickled the damp nape of Connie's neck, but the instant she noticed it, the air stilled again and the chimes went silent.

Connie felt her stomach curling up into a shriveled little fist underneath her heart. "Jade?" she whispered. "Jade, are you doing this?"

There were no chimes this time, and no voices in her head, and no new understand of what was happening to her.

She felt her eyes sting, and clenched her eyelids shut. "I could really use you right about now. You kind of left your body stuck in my chest. Can you please come back and help me figure out what's happening?"

Silence answered inside and out.

Her fists balled tightly at her sides, her knuckles cracking. "Please," she said, voice quavering. "Please come back. Please."

Nothing.

"Please!" she shouted into the stillness.

Her voice rattled the room, knocking her breakfast across the tabletop and throwing her orange juice into a puddle on the floor. The empty cardboard box tumbled and smacked into the refrigerator hard enough to crumple its corner. Curtains at the window billowed and snapped like flags, and the wind chime jerked against its hook, its chimes banging into each other and the clapper in a cacophony of noise.

Startled by the sudden windstorm, Connie scrambled backwards out of the room, running from the screaming notes of the wind chime. For just a second, it felt as though she were running against a hurricane gale, but she pushed through it and ran up the stairs and into her room.

The door slammed behind her, and she braced against it, chest heaving. Familiar jitters of adrenaline shivered in her nerve endings. She closed her eyes and forced her breathing to slow, concentrating on the simple physical process. In moments, her heart rate eased, and the pounding in her ears faded.

An odd weight hung in one of her hands. Looking down, she jerked in surprise to find the doorknob to her bedroom hanging broken in her hand, ripped out of its housing in the door. She didn't remember feeling the knob break away, and couldn't imagine how much effort it would have taken to manage the feat on purpose. But the broken ends of the metal were fresh and obvious, and still sharp when she tested it with her thumb.

With her wits returning, she could hear herself think again, and only one thought rang clearly in her mind. "Steven."


	2. Razzle Dazzle

"Those sound like Gem powers!" Steven exclaimed, his excitement ringing tinnily through the phone.

Connie continued flipping through the hardcover omnibus of the _Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Novels_. In the time it had taken her to recount the morning's antics to Steven, she had paged through the majority of the book. Now she closed its back cover, and every single word of it remained in her mind with perfect clarity. "Maybe the wind stuff," Connie hedged. "But reading? That seems like a weird power."

She could practically hear him shrugging. "Gem powers can get pretty weird. Remember when we met?"

A smile cracked through Connie's worry. "I remember it a little bit," she teased.

"And that was one of the less crazy times. Wait until you turn into cats. Or a baby! You were around for that one too." His blushing was so deep that it seeped crimson and bright into his voice.

Running her hand across the smooth, glossy letters of the omnibus cover, Connie felt her smile fading. "Jade did say that she read all of my books in one night," she admitted.

"Maybe this is just your gemstone's powers coming in. Like mine came in for me!"

Memories slipped through the lids of her clenched eyes, and she relived the early days of Jade's reawakening. The bodiless Gem had only her winds to herself back then. She had been helpless, voiceless, and when Connie had traded places with her for just a few hours, it had felt like torture. Now even Jade's winds had been taken from her empty stone.

Her hand shook, raking her knuckles across the book cover. "It's not my gemstone," she muttered.

The other end of the call hung silent for a long moment. Connie silently cursed herself for saying that. Steven was trying to help her. The last thing she wanted to do was foist her mountain of guilt onto his shoulders.

Forcing her tone to brighten, she continued, "But maybe you're right. This could just be happening because the gemstone is still inside of me. I'm just worried now about what's going to happen. I mean, if I can blast a wind chime at ten paces, what else can I do?"

Steven's voice came back with even more cheer and confidence. "You just need to practice, like I did! You can get a handle on it when you come over for sword training. There's lots of air up there to blow around! Or, I guess there's air pretty much everywhere, but the only people you could knock off would be me or Pearl. And we'd be okay if we fell."

An imaginary windblown Steven floating to the ground was a pretty cute thought, far cuter than a plummeting Pearl. But then that thought made her think of the explosive nose-blowing on the night after Jade's…on the night after the battle. The next time something like that happened, her parents might be in the line of fire. "Jade used to brag that she could take a building right off its foundation. Am I gonna do that by accident?" she said, as much to herself as to Steven.

"Oh, yeah," Steven said, as if that thought hadn't occurred to him either. "It's too bad you don't live out on a beach. There's plenty of room for big mistakes without anybody getting hurt. That's why my Dad and the Gems built the house on the front of the temple. Stuff gets broken around here all the time, but it's no big deal."

Connie's mouth quirked as she tried to imagine her parents being as blasé about property damage as the Gems were. During their previous cross-country move, her father had hired movers for the furniture, and ended up with a scratch on the antique grandfather clock that had led to a weeklong argument and desperate attempts at do-it-yourself fixes that had led to more arguments and hurt feelings. If Connie accidentally blew out the windows, it would send her whole family, Connie included, into hysterics.

Frankly, everyone would be a lot safer if Connie just stayed somewhere where an accidental gust wouldn't be a tragedy, somewhere like the b—

A sudden realization struck Connie dumb. As the details of the idea took form, she realized that it was accidentally brilliant, solving almost every problem caused by these burgeoning powers all at once. It made perfect sense.

But it also felt unbelievably selfish, and ridiculous, and impossible, and it scared Connie with how much she had wanted it all along without realizing it.

Her ongoing silence made Connie realize that Steven hadn't spoken for nearly a minute either. She checked to make certain that their call hadn't dropped, and then waited to see if he would repeat some question or comment she had missed. But his wordlessness in the phone seemed to vibrate with the same kind of excitement she could feel jittering in her own body. "Steven?" she said. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I think so." He spoke in a hush, but there was a growing excitement straining to burst through the words.

Connie's heart beat faster. "Would…" She swallowed hard. "Would that be okay?" she asked, and then held her breath.

Somehow Connie could feel Steven grinning through the phone even before he shouted his enthusiastic reply directly into her ear.

* * *

"Huh. When did this happen?"

Connie watched from the corner of her eye as her father stood on tiptoe to run his thumb against the kitchen wall, feeling at a nigh-imperceptible scratch in the paint behind where the wind chime hung. She couldn't quite stifle her wince as she realized one of the chimes must have struck the wall during her windy incident—windcident?—earlier that day.

Glancing sidelong, Connie caught her mother staring curiously at her, and wondered if she had been busted already. But her mother seemed more concerned with the plateful of untouched dinner Connie was scraping into the garbage can instead. "Not in the mood for stir fry?" her mother asked.

Offering up a weak smile, Connie said, "It tasted great, Mom. I just…had a big lunch."

"Mmm-hmm," her mother hummed noncommittally, and stacked the dinner plates in the sink.

Connie's heart thundered in her ears. She wasn't eager to jump into the night's looming discussion, but anything had to be better than listening to her mother fuss over Connie's lack of appetite again. "Actually, I've kind of had something on my mind. Would it be okay if we had a family meeting?"

Now both of her parents eyed her with mild suspicion. "Family meeting" was the polite term they had always used to announce some unpleasant decision beyond Connie's control. They were the words that proceeded each new relocation, or a doctor's appointment. But this was the first time Connie had turned the phrase back on them. "Okay," her father drawled, and set aside the dirty pans from dinner.

They followed Connie into the living room and settled onto the couch. Beneath their open curiosity, Connie could sense a hint of concern. It was probably warranted, given everything they had been through in the last few months, but it made Connie nervous all the same. Luckily, she had written down her talking points and read them ahead of time, so she wouldn't forget them. Ever.

"First, thanks for coming," Connie said in what she hoped was a mature, adult tone.

"Thank you for hosting the meeting," her father replied, a tiny smile pulling at the edge of his mouth.

Her mother remained all frowns and business. "Connie, is everything alright?"

Connie steadied herself with a deep breath. That was the very question she had been dreading, and the one for which she was most prepared. Bending, she drew out the cardboard box given to her that morning and set it on the coffee table. The box's top was open, and all of her new books were neatly stacked inside it. "I finished all the books," she announced.

Concern turned to parental skepticism in her mother's expression. "Connie," she said, sounding reproachful, "I'm glad you're excited about the possibility of space camp, but we expect you to do the work before we have that discussion. It doesn't count if you skim the books and look up summaries on the internet."

She couldn't have scripted a better setup if she'd tried. _Showtime_ , Connie told herself. Then, with a carefully straight face, she said, "You don't understand. I didn't just read all of these books. I read every book in the house today. And I know all of them."

That got the reaction she'd been looking for. Her mother shed the last of her concern to appear wholly skeptical, while her father perked up, intrigued. "Like, 'all the books,' all the books?" he asked, and looked at the bookshelf at the far end of the room.

She nodded. "Pick a book and tell me the page number," Connie told him.

Her father leaned forward and grinned. She could tell he was expecting some kind of trick or prank. Her mother, though, rose from the couch and went to the bookcase, alternatively searching through its volumes to find a suitable challenge and glancing back at Connie in confusion.

Connie's father was faster on the draw, and had a book from the box opened in front of him. "Show me what you got, Lady Library," he said, and then gave her a page number.

Connie didn't need to think for even a full second before she began to recite: "As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a distance, hallooing. 'Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!' He looked around, but could see nothing but a crow winging its solitary flight across the mountain." Then she paused, raising her eyebrows in a silent question, asking if she should proceed.

He nodded as he read along with her, then snapped the book shut to reveal an eager face. "Okay, what's the trick? Did you memorize a little bit from each of the books? Use subliminal hints to make me pick this one?"

"Connie," her mother called, commanding the room's attention with her no-nonsense tone. She had one of her old textbooks opened and was looking down to a page Connie couldn't see. "Chapter Nine-Point-Three," she said, pointedly omitting the page number.

So Connie supplied it. "Page two-seventy," she said, and then recited: "Humans have a large surface area over which to exchange gases with their environment. The respiratory system actively moves air in and out, or _ventilates_ , the lungs and then exchanges gases with cells in the blood."

Her mother's eyes grew wider as Connie read. Before Connie could go on, her mother slammed the book shut and stared. Her confusion broke the smile in her husband's face. "Connie, what's going on?" she demanded.

Connie tried to smile and look at ease, even though she felt more nervous than she ever had presenting a report at school. "Something happened today. Something woke up," she said, and touched the gemstone at her collar.

A moment of stunned silence followed the admission. Then, in a small voice, her father asked, "Is Jade back?"

She had been expecting the question. Even still, it landed like a punch to the stomach. "No," Connie murmured, shaking her head. "But I think her powers are. Back, I mean. In me."

Her mother put the textbook back on the shelf. Hand lingering, she touched at the wood. Connie could tell her mother had noticed the dust disturbed in front of each book from when they had been pulled earlier. "This happened today?" her mother asked, and the real question behind it was obvious.

"I promise," Connie insisted, lifting her hands. "Jade was an Archivist in space. It was her job to remember everything. So now I guess I can too. Or at least everything I read. And I can read super-fast. It's actually pretty cool. I mean, I did all my summer homework in a few minutes."

Already Connie could see the wheels turning in her mother's head. There was concern and uncertainty, of course. But Connie knew there was a tiny spark of calculation behind those feelings. Her mother was seeing grade point averages and college applications. Maybe even early acceptances. Prestigious institutions vying for Connie through scholarships and more.

 _You sold the razzle,_ Connie told herself, and allowed for a tiny smile. _Now sell the dazzle._

Connie retrieved her next prop from under the coffee table, hefting it a few inches over the floor with her whole body. It was a large dumbbell, rusted at its edges and stamped with a prominent number at each end.

Her father stood up for a better look. "Hey, is that one of my old free weights? You know, your old man was pretty buff back in college. I've been meaning to get back into it," he said, and flexed a bicep. "Just gotta find a good time to start."

Folding her arms, her mother quipped, "Yes, it's been a hectic couple of decades."

Connie drowned out their banter and stared down at the dumbbell. She hadn't gotten to practice this part as much as she would have liked. Thinking muscular thoughts, Connie reached down, grasped the dumbbell in one hand, and hoisted it over her head.

The two adults went silent immediately.

The reaction made Connie grin, and she felt her body surge with whatever power let her lift the weight. It was heavier than her sword, and much more cumbersome, but she hefted it without any real effort.

"See?" she said, and held the weight straight out in front of her, and her arm remained utterly motionless. "I can't exactly stop a runaway train, but I'm way stronger now than I was. Sometimes." She swung the weight straight up again and began twisting its ends from side to side above her head. "I kinda found out when I sort of, a little bit, broke my bedroom door—"

Her mother's eyes, already saucer-wide, went bigger still as Connie released two of her fingers from the weight's grip. "Connie, you put that down this instant before you hurt yourself!" the woman snapped.

The commanding tone startled Connie. Suddenly all of the weight rushed back into Connie's arm, which couldn't handle it by half. She yelped and ducked out from under the plummeting dumbbell. Its end clipped the corner of the coffee table on the way to the floor, and a large divot crumbled out of the wood, leaving splintery edges and a dusting of shards on the floor.

Horrified, Connie stared at the crushed tip of the table. Her worst fears about her meeting, or presentation, or whatever she was trying to do stared back at her with ugly splinters. This was the scratched grandfather clock times a million. Now they would never listen to her.

"The Moron's Guide to Home Repair," Connie mumbled to herself, kneeling down to touch at the splinters. "Maintenance is key but for those times when preparation and lacquer won't do, you have to get your hands on some tools. See Table Six-One for essential must-have tools for your home." The page in her mind loomed large, and she wondered if maybe, perhaps, if only she could fix this, that her parents might still listen to her.

"Connie?" her father said.

"Lacquer," Connie continued, and suddenly she was living in a Ficklepedia page. "The term lacquer is used for a number of hard and potentially shiny finishes applied to materials such as wood." Then she tried to shake the page away. She didn't need to know about lacquer, she just needed the right kind from the store.

"Connie," her mother said, sounding upset. Or so Connie thought. It was hard to hear either of her parents for some reason. Was something wrong with her ears?

"The ability to feel an object, hear sounds," said Connie, at once buried in her mother's textbook again, "and maintain balance results from the stimulation of sensory receptors, called mechanoreceptors, located in skin and ears."

Maybe she could buy a new table? And a new doorknob. How much would that cost? She could read a flyer for a local hardware store, and then she would always know, forever. And her parents wouldn't be mad at her anymore, and she could tell them her plan, and they would listen.

"Connie!" Her parents' voices together barely reached her. They sounded afraid. And looking up from the table, Connie could see why.

The living room shook in a tempest. Fierce winds circled around them, tearing at the pictures on the walls and rattling the furniture. The books on the table flipped open and rifled their pages in a cacophony of rattling paper. Her mother and father stood together, squinting against the wind, their hair twisting and clothes fluttering and snapping. Even in the relative calm of the tempest's eye, Connie could feel her hair tug at her, trying to draw her into the storm's current.

Clutching at her temples, Connie tried to will the tempest silent with her mind. "No, no, no!" she cried.

"Connie," her mother shouted above the roar, her stern voice thready with panic. "We're not mad, but we are concerned. We need you to stop all of this right now!"

"I'm trying!" Connie protested. She even scooped at the wind with her hands, as if that would do anything. For all she knew, it would. But it didn't. "I'm sorry!"

Her mother put on her _hospital face_ , the expression Connie knew could send the toughest nurses scurrying for cover. "Connie you stop the wind this instant!" But the expression cracked, and Connie could see her mother's gambit for what it was. She felt as lost and scared as Connie did.

Then her father wrapped his arms around her mother, bracing them both against the wind, and shouted, "Connie, I've had **gust** about enough of this wind nonsense!"

Connie blinked. Squinting through the storm and noise, she traded looks of confusion with her mother.

Furrowing his brow, her father raised his voice even higher. "Young lady, if you're trying to make a point, you're really **blowing** it right now!"

She had to be hearing things. The house was about to fall down around them, and he was cracking jokes? Connie wondered if she, or her father, or both of them had gone crazy.

"Did you think we would like all of this wind? Well, we're not **big fans**!" he hollered above the tempest.

Connie couldn't help it. Despite her fear, and the anger she felt at herself, she started giggling.

In seconds, the wind began to die down. The books, the furniture, and the rattling pictures all settled, and her parents' blown-out hair laid sideways as the air finally calmed around them. Connie felt her own long hair easing back over her shoulders, five times its normal volume but blissfully still.

Her giggling petered out, and Connie leaned against the coffee table, her palm pressing absently at the broken corner. She didn't think the sight of it would set her off again, but she didn't want to take any chances.

Sagging, her father collapsed back into the couch, dragging her mother to his side. He looked relieved, but his face was drawn, and his hand was laced into his wife's, clenched to quell their shaking. "Nothing," he said, "stops a room dead quite like a Dad Joke."

"I am very glad I married you for your looks," her mother intoned tiredly. But she kissed the back of his hand, then dropped their clasped hands back to the couch. Looking to Connie, she said in a cautious tone, "Are you alright?"

Connie shook her head. "I'm sorry," she said in a tiny voice. "I didn't mean to do that."

Her mother and father exchanged a wordless look. Then they slid apart and each held out a hand. Relief flooded through Connie as she practically hurdled the coffee table to sit between them on the couch. The feeling of both of them squished around her on the small couch was already easing the churning sensation in her empty stomach.

"We know you didn't," her mother assured her, and stroked at Connie's windblown hair. "But this is…an issue. I think we need to… We need to…"

A helpless silence tumbled after her faltering words. It seemed to last forever, until her father broke it for a humorless chuckle. "Let's be honest," he said. "We don't know what we need to do. There aren't any books on what to do when your child starts making tornados." He glanced down, only half-kidding as he asked Connie, "There aren't any books on that, right?"

She shook her head. "I checked," she told him.

Her mother sighed and wrapped a possessive arm around Connie, drawing her even closer. "I never liked that table anyway," she said. "The important thing is that we keep everyone safe until we figure this out."

Connie felt a flicker of hope returning. Her careful planning had blown up in her face, but maybe that had worked to her advantage. "Actually," she admitted, "Steven and I have been talking, and we had some thoughts about that…"


	3. Burrito Machine

Morning sunlight gleamed in the smooth, clear waters. The weather was warm, but a cool breeze blew in from the ocean to soften the first bite of summer's heat. Part of Connie was overjoyed to be back in Beach City to enjoy the perfect day at the shore. But another part, a larger part, dragged a sense of dread behind her like an anchor in the sand. That her parents were walking behind her made the feeling even more tangible.

As they crossed the beach together toward the house beneath the temple, she could feel her parents staring over her head at the imposing figure jutting out of the cliff face. "Do they actually wash their clothes up there?" her mother asked.

Connie glanced up at the washer and dryer perched high above on one of the temple's hands. Anxiety coiled around her empty stomach, but she kept it out of her voice as she answered, "Oh, sure. But I think Pearl does all the laundry, and there's a warp pad up there anyway, so it's totally safe. Nobody needs to jump up and down from there." Any of the Gems certainly could make the jump if they wanted to, and likely did so all the time, but Connie made sure to leave that part unmentioned.

"Mmn," her mother grunted, still staring up at the shirts and pants fluttering on the drying line high above them. She did not sound assuaged.

Knuckles aching, Connie clenched her fists at her side. The point of their visit was to prove to her parents that the beach house could be, would be, a safe place for Connie to figure out this new whatever-it-was with Jade's gemstone. If they were hesitant to send her to a regimented, heavily regulated place like space camp, they would definitely think twice—thrice!—about letting Connie stay with the Gems. She had to keep her nervousness in check.

That check became harder still to keep when they climbed the steps of the porch to find a colorful banner hung above the door, greeting them with the words, _WELCOME NEW CAMPERS!_

Scratching his chin, her father stared up at the banner and said, "So, when you said this could be 'like a summer camp,' what exactly did you mean?"

Connie couldn't answer, having no idea herself. A murmuring of soft voices drifted through the screen door, but stopped at the sound of footsteps on the porch. The door opened, and Steven stepped out to greet them. He wore a pink baseball cap marked with a yellow star to match his shirt, and a silver athletics whistle hung from a nylon cord around his neck. A wooden clipboard was tucked under his arm as he extended his free hand to greet Connie's family, shaking each of their hands.

If he was put off by the bewildered looks Connie and her parents were all giving him as they reflexively returned the handshake, his salesman's smile didn't show it. "Welcome! You must be the…" He checked his clipboard, flipping through several blank pages. "—Maheswaran family! And you're the first to arrive! Very punctual. We'll just wait until everyone checks in, and then we can start the tour."

They stared back at him in a moment of confused silence.

Steven checked his clipboard again, and then announced, "Well, it looks like that's everyone. Please follow me, and we'll get started!"

Connie forced a giant smile onto her face as she motioned for her dumbstruck parents to follow Steven, trying to pretend as though she had any idea of what was happening. But even that fantasy shattered as she stepped through the door and entered some bizarre alternative of the house she had been expecting.

The walls and furniture were obscured behind a forest of cardboard cutouts, each one hewn and hastily spray-painted to look like crude, zigzagged pine trees. A tight circle of stones sat in the middle of the floor, with more cardboard wedged inside the circle and painted to resemble a roaring campfire of logs and sticks. Cartoonish cardboard wildlife frolicked motionlessly in the corrugated forest, including a bear wearing a park ranger's hat and a racoon that appeared to be wearing some kind of jet pack.

Peridot stood at the campfire, holding a set of metal tongs with a raw s'more pinched in the tines over cardboard flames. Her triangle of bushy hair had been stuffed into a pink ball cap identical to Steven's, and she wore a matching whistle around her neck. Behind her, Greg Universe lounged on the couch, a half-tuned guitar spitting out notes as he tested its pegs. Pearl sat beside him with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her face a tight grimace that was probably meant to be a smile. And above them in the loft, Amethyst lay upside-down on Steven's bed, a video game _beeping_ and _booping_ on the TV screen while the controller clacked in her hands.

When she saw the new arrivals, Peridot flung the tongs and their contents aside and opened her arms in a broad gesture. "Ah, welcome, Connie Jade and caregivers! You have the honor of being the first visitors to Camp Crystal Gem!"

 _Camp Crystal Gem_? Connie mouthed the name silently at Steven, making her face a question. Steven just smiled and offered her a thumbs-up in reply, which answered nothing, but made her feel the tiniest bit better.

Pearl rose from the couch and began, "When Steven told us about Connie's problems with her g—"

Peridot sidestepped, upstaging Pearl. "The camp is a multi-disciplinary immersive environment for burgeoning human-gem hybrids, designed almost exclusively by me, Peridot. I'm the head camp counselor, a firm-but-fair authority figure who balances whimsy with responsibility, and just wants to see the campers have the same kind of experience she had when she was a larva like them."

"You were never a kid," Amethyst grunted from the loft.

Ignoring the comment, Peridot wrapped an arm around Steven, presenting him to the Maheswarans. "Steven is our co-counselor, and the son of the camp's owner. His too-cool attitude and feigned indifference masks a deep uncertainty about his taking over the family business one day."

Steven's smile cracked and widened. "I'm so conflicted?" he said.

Pearl tried to chime in, but Peridot interrupted her again with the full sum of her body and voice. "And Pearl is the camp cook. She doesn't get any storylines."

Mouth tightening, Pearl said, "Why don't I get you some refreshments?" She spun on her heel and marched into the kitchen, gathering plates and dishes in the huffiest manner she could.

"I'm not sure I understand," Connie's mother drawled as she stared at the cardboard forest surrounding them. "We just thought Connie would be staying with you for a little while. This is…more?"

Connie braced her smile with a deep breath, and then turned to her parents, gesturing to the madness around them. "Oh, I get it!" she said loudly. "The Gems put all this together as a big metaphor for the kind of environment they want to create for me while I stay with them! It's not literally a summer camp, but it's just as safe and reliable as if it actually were. Right?" She hurled the last word at Steven with an unspoken plea beneath it, beaming panic at him with a look she hoped her parents wouldn't see.

Steven mercifully received her message, and started to agree with her. But Peridot upstaged him as well with the speed and certainty of a used car salesperson. "What? No, that's ridiculous. This is one hundred percent a real summer camp, right down to its rustic yet exquisite facility tailor-made for demi-human survival. We have walls, a ceiling, a door that actually closes, running water available in a wide range of temperatures, and active electricity available from nearly any wall! But don't take my word for it. Take it from the camp's founder!"

She clambered over the coffee table and hopped onto the couch to drag Greg into the conversation. The old musician grinned uncomfortably as he waved and said, "Uh, hey! Actually, we're really excited about Connie coming to stay here. And I got a bunch of stuff to make her feel welcome."

Greg reached under the coffee table and drew out a bundle of thick metal rods mashed into some olive-colored canvas. Then he spread the rods and planted their rubber ends on the floor, snapping the canvas taut into a long rectangle.

"Voila!" said Greg. "Presenting the _All Cot Up_ , the pinnacle of mobile sleeping technology. I picked it up years ago at a military surplus store. Four out of five drill sergeants rated it 'too good for those worthless maggots!'"

Forgetting her worry for a moment, Connie ran her hands across the edge of the cot. The canvas felt rough, and its thick seams pinched at her skin. It wobbled at her touch, its rods creaking. This contraption seemed to be a different species entirely from her big, comfy bed back at home, and that made it feel exactly right for the summer Connie had imagined. "It's perfect!" she declared, beaming up at Greg.

His face lit up, and he retrieved a big metal box next, setting it onto the tabletop with a heavy thunk. "And it comes with a matching footlocker. Father Time took care of most of the leftover boot odor, but I'm sure an air freshener will cover up the rest."

As Connie marveled at the adventurer's comforts Greg had gotten her, she heard a note of alarm enter her father's voice behind her. "So both of the kids would sleep in the same room? Together?" he said.

"Well…there's really only the one room," Greg said, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Not accurate," Peridot noted. "And I can vouch for the long-term viability of the bathroom as a private cell. That's where they held me prisoner, and I adapted just fine!"

Greg quickly knelt to put his arm around Steven, tapping the boy's hat bill up to better see his abashed features. "We taught Schtu-ball here from an early age about being a good roommate, seeing as how he had three of them right away. Oh, and he and I just had part two of the 'Birds and Bees' talk to cover anything we missed the first time around. So there are no surprises."

Steven blushed furiously, and he yanked the hat bill back down over his face. Connie might have thought it cute if her own face wasn't blazing with embarrassment.

"How old are you again, Steven?" her father asked.

"Fourteen," Steven squeaked from underneath the hat.

As Connie watched, her father went from being shocked, to scandalized, to slightly impressed, and then to deeply suspicious, all within the span of one second. Thankfully, her mother already seemed beyond the horrors of a perpetual boy-girl sleepover and into broader concerns as she gingerly swiped the interior of the footlocker. Her finger came out of the box with a thick cake of rust at the tip. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of room for Connie or her things," her mother said, a world of unspoken criticism bulging behind the veneer of her civil tone.

"Sure there is!" Connie insisted. "A-And I don't need that much—"

Peridot again thrust herself to the forefront. "Not to worry. We have an adaptive piece of camp equipment that can serve any need imaginable." Then she stamped her foot and bellowed, "Amethyst!"

The stocky Quartz moaned and let her game controller drop to the bed. Her groan persisted as she flumped off the mattress, then off the edge of the loft, landing heavily on the couch. "Don't call me 'equipment,'" she groused.

"Hey, do you want me to build you that burrito machine or not? You promised to help. Now be storage for Connie Jade!" commanded Peridot.

"Burrito machine?" Connie's father said.

With another groan, Amethyst dissolved her body into white light and poured it onto the coffee table, where it solidified and dimmed into the shape of a second footlocker. Her gemstone sat where the lock should have been, and her eyes were unnervingly far apart at either end of the locker's face. The lid clacked as she spoke, revealing big teeth and a wide pink tongue inside. "Put stuff inside me, yo! I promise I won't eat it. Probably."

Even Connie, well inured to Amethyst's varying shapes, was discomfited by this transformation. So she really couldn't blame her parents for backing sharply away from the table and its talking locker. "Amethyst, you don't really have to—" began Connie.

"Connie Jade is right!" Peridot insisted. "Where's the imagination? Where's the grandeur worthy of Camp Crystal Gem? You can do better!"

The wide eyes of the purple footlocker rolled, and then vanished into another white glow. After pouring herself onto the floor, Amethyst stretched upward into a looming six-foot tower, her roundness hardening into sharp corners. New details bulged forth in the shape of curling scrollwork, patterns of white and deep lavender arising to frame a pair of tall rectangular doors. As the last of the light faded, Amethyst solidified into a large, ornate freestanding armoire. The Gem's face sat above the doors as part of an elaborate carving. "Tada!" she sang.

"…I mean," Connie drawled, smiling back at her befuddled parents, "that's better, right?"

"And check it!" Amethyst said. Her eyes grew hooded, her smile vanishing. "Behind my doors lies a magical gateway to a strange, mysterious world where talking animals fight against a tyrannical witch!"

Connie bit her lip, not sure whether to laugh or cry as she watched her parents eyes grow huge. Anxiety wrung her empty stomach like a sponge.

Then Amethyst laughed. "Nah, I'm kidding, you guys! It's just Pearl."

The armoire doors swung outward, revealing a view of the kitchen through the backless, empty Gem-furniture. Pearl stepped gingerly through the armoire with platters of food balanced in her hands. "I made Turkish Delights!" the pale Gem announced.

A tiny breath jetted through Connie's nose as she sagged in relief, watching her parents approach the _hors d'oeuvres_ carefully. She could always count on Pearl's impeccable instincts for hospitality. The Gem was already talking about how seriously she took Steven's food, and how they made sure he ate every day. Comparatively, the tales of Steven's frozen dinner diet was a ray of sunshine into the gloom, even if it did made the color drain out of Connie's mother's face.

Steven sidled up next to Connie as her parents gave the tray of snacks a tepid response. "Hey," he whispered. "How do you think it's going?"

Her empty stomach stress-gargled one reply, while her mouth answered, "Not exactly how I thought it would."

"Sorry," he whispered. "I was talking to the guys about having you here, and I let it slip that it would be kind of like a Gem summer camp. As soon as Peridot heard that, she started offering suggestions, and then it all kind of just…happened."

"It's okay," Connie whispered back. "I'm really glad they like the idea at all." Her stomach growled again, and she clutched at her middle, frowning.

Steven's frown deepened as he watched her. Then he darted a few steps and hopped into the air, floating behind Pearl. He scooped an array of _hors d'oeuvres_ into a bowl he made out of his shirt front, then dropped down and scampered back to Connie. "Well, everything is better with food. And Pearl really went all-out with this stuff. Here!"

She was about to object when Steven tossed a Turkish Delight at her in a high arc. Her warrior instincts took over, and she ducked under the flying delight to catch it on her tongue. A sweet bouquet filled her mouth as she chewed, and she grinned. "Wow!" she said around the mouthful.

"Right?" Steven said, popping a delight in his own mouth. "Here, go long for a cake ball!"

Connie jogged a couple of steps backward and snatched the treat out of the air with her teeth. Giggles bubbled up in her chest as she swallowed and then opened her mouth for Steven to make another toss. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of her father staring at them both from the edge of the conversation with Pearl. He seemed shocked at the sight of the teens and their game.

On reflex, Connie drew her hands together in front of her and stood perfectly straight, ignoring the treat that went sailing over her head. "We'd better not right now," she whispered to Steven, and tried to watch her father's reaction from her periphery.

Her father looked like he was about to say something to her, his brow wrinkling with concern. Or maybe disappointment? But then her mother elbowed him gently, drawing him back into her conversation with Pearl. "Both of us," her mother said, loudly suggesting that her husband pay attention again, "are very grateful that you're willing to open your home to Connie. We're just not sure this is the most conducive place for her to spend her summer. It's more important than ever that she have a chance to start building her college applications, networking with potential contacts that can support her, and creating a foundation of extracurriculars that will help her future path."

"Sword-training does help my future path," Connie snapped without thinking. The heat in her own voice surprised her, and certainly surprised her mother, whose brow furrowed at the tone.

Pearl's mouth flapped in wordlessness, unable to break the argument gathering between Connie's and her mother's scowls. Connie herself wasn't sure what else she could say that she hadn't already said a dozen times to her mother. So she was almost grateful when Peridot interrupted them again. Almost.

"Camp romance!" the engineer blurted.

The non-sequitur proved powerful enough to break the spell, and rescued Connie from having to repeat the same old fight she had inadvertently renewed.

Once again the center of attention, Peridot composed herself, and said, "Naturally, an essential component of the camp experience is the camp romance. No season is complete without it! And whereas other camps need to rely on multiple incomplete romantic options: the jock, the genius, the best friend with the longstanding unspoken crush—"

Standing behind Peridot, Steven tried to stuff himself up into his hat.

"—but Camp Crystal Gem has its own dedicated apex romancer!" Peridot announced.

Pearl raised an eyebrow. "We do?"

"Amethyst!" bellowed Peridot.

The purple armoire sighed, then blurred into white light and condensed herself into a thick, masculine shape. When the light faded, Amethyst became a long-haired hunk wearing tattered jeans and flipflops. The sleeves of her star-branded T-shirt were torn away, revealing thick, strong arms. Her round face featured a familiar, now cleanshaven smile as Amethyst posed and flexed in her new body. "Whassup?" she purred, winking.

Connie recognized the figure from the old album covers and Polaroid pictures Steven had shown her of his dad's rock star past. Amethyst had become a perfect purple copy of a young Mister Universe, complete with long, flowing hair.

"…what a great point, Amethyst," Steven said, breaking the thunderous stunned silence of the room. "Camp Crystal Gem is the best at everything, which includes making things super-awkward. Heh…" He looked to his father for help, but Greg was oblivious, staring down as he cradled his gut forlornly.

The hairs on Connie's neck tingled, and she thought she felt the stirrings of air around her. Another windy meltdown would almost be welcome at this point, if it didn't mean endangering an entire room filled with the people she cared about the most, and Peridot. Before the air could pick up any speed from her despair, though, a voice from outside called to them, "I'm back."

"Thank the stars," Pearl muttered. Then, hastily cutting a smile across her mouth, she announced, "That must be Garnet! Let's everyone forget whatever Amethyst is doing and go see what she has, right now!"

"Please, yes!" Connie hiccupped before Pearl had finished speaking. Their tour group shambled out the front door at Pearl's urging. Amethyst, reading the room—or perhaps Connie's silent screams—changed back into her usual shape along the way.

As her eyes adjusted to sunlight again, Connie found Garnet walking out of the surf. Rivulets of water drizzled out of the fusion's shoulder pads, and her afro sagged wetly as she strode onto dry sand. A rectangular box made of half-rotted planks sat perched on one of her shoulders, kept in balance by a light, bejeweled touch.

With her free hand, Garnet slid a triangular diving mask up from her face, revealing her angular visor underneath as she greeted Connie's parents with a nod. "Mission accomplished," she told Steven, who grinned.

"Steven explained how important it was for Connie to collect scholarships for college," Pearl explained. "And once he clarified that it meant money, and not vessels devoted to research, we knew we could help."

Sniffing, Peridot added, "Though I am prepared to take my Biblioboat schematics to the prototype phase if needed."

"I still like 'The Readership' better for a name," Steven said.

"It's my design, so I get to name it," Peridot hissed.

"So," Pearl said loudly, her rictus smile widening, "presenting the _Crystal Gem Scholarship Award For Excellence In Being Connie_. Steven came up with the title."

"I wasn't aware Rose Quartzes had special naming powers too," Peridot grumbled exactly loud enough to be heard.

With zero flourish, Carnet dropped the crate and ripped off its rotting top. The wood peeled away in a curl of dripping splinters to reveal a bed of glittering, glistening coins inside the box. Connie felt her heart jump as her eyes widened upon a veritable fortune in rough-hewn coins. Their minting had been faded by centuries of ocean living, but the contents couldn't be mistaken for anything else.

"You got me sunken pirate treasure?" Connie exclaimed, bouncing up and down excitedly. "Ohmygosh, thank you! You guys are the best!"

"Boom. Scholarship," Garnet said, and smiled. Then her expression sobered, and she added, "I don't know how much a college costs, so if that's not enough, I can go get more."

Greg feigned indignation, grinning all the while as he whined, "Hey, you guys never offered me a scholarship!"

"You never asked," Garnet retorted. "And you don't qualify for the _Crystal Gem Scholarship Award For Excellence In Being Connie_."

"Got me there," agreed Greg. "I probably would have spent it all on chili fries at the student union anyway."

Connie grinned up at her mother and father, ready to make a joke about how they could now spend her existing college fund on that rocket bike she had asked for when she was six years old. But her smile trickled flat when she saw the slackened, wide-eyed, bloodless expressions plastered over her parents' faces. They looked shell-shocked, staring with open mouths at the Gems' wonderful gift. Why weren't they excited? Why weren't they happy? Connie hadn't seen her parents look so lost since…

…since they had all faced down Flint and Milky Quartz in the Kindergarten.

Her parents' silent shock resonated through Connie like a flat note that she was just now hearing, one that undoubtedly had been blaring at her since they had set foot on the beach. Everything—the shapeshifting, the camp pageantry, and now a lifechanging amount of money being handed to them—had broken her parents. It was too much at once, and Connie hadn't seen that until after she had helped shove them into the thick of it. Any hope that she might have had of convincing her parents that the beach house would be a calm, safe place for her to get Jade's gemstone under control had been shattered, if it had ever been real at all.

"Nonsense, Garnet," Peridot said imperiously. "Camp Crystal Gem isn't just an immersive environment. It's a submersive environment!" Then she snapped her fingers, and commanded, "Amethyst, become a submarine capable of deep-water exploration that Connie Jade can pilot. And survive in."

Amethyst blinked. "Uh, I can do a helicopter, and I can do a dolphin. Maybe I can mash them up somehow?"

Peridot heaved into her whistle, blasting Connie out of her misery with the shrill noise. "Unacceptable!" the little Gem howled. "If you want that burrito machine, you'd better turn into something that facilitates ocean exploration right now!"

The Quartz scowled. "Fine," she said. Then her scowl vanished into white light. An instant later, Amethyst's body had ballooned outward, transforming into a tremendous purple catapult. Her face had become the bucket, which scooped underneath Peridot's feet with its menacing grin. Then, unleashing a mighty _twang_ , the catapult flung Peridot out to sea. The engineer's scream dwindled, and then vanished into a faint _splish_ near the horizon.

Pearl massaged the bridge of her nose. "Amethyst…" she scolded.

"Oh, don't even start," the catapult groused, and turned back into Amethyst. "She was being a jerk. No burrito machine is worth that much hassle."

Connie wished she could smile at the Gems' banter, but all she could focus on was her parents' stunned faces. Their silence hadn't gone unnoticed, and even Amethyst and Pearl tabled their impending argument to give the two visitors space. As Connie watched them stare dumbly at the soggy crate, she wondered if there was anything left she could say or do that might salvage the day.

But Greg beat her to it, clapping his hands and rubbing them together briskly. "Okay," he announced, "I think that's lunch."


	4. Teenage Rebellion

Sprawled on the couch, Connie succumbed to the groan that had been building inside of her. The sound rattled every part of her body, from her heels hooked over the back of the couch to the ends of her hair brushing at the floor, and seemed to fill every inch of the beach house at once.

"You said it," Amethyst said from the patch of floor where she basked in a sunbeam.

Steven sat right-side up next to Connie on the couch, rubbing his arm. A guilty look dragged at his features. "I'm sorry if it didn't go so great," he said again.

It was the eighth time he had apologized since Greg had herded her shell-shocked parents toward the city for a sit-down lunch. _Grown-ups only_ , the old rock star had told her, answering her worried look with a wink. _We'll bring you two back something._ And then they'd all trudged up the beach together, leaving Connie behind to decide everything without her.

Pearl sighed as she lugged a stack of cardboard trees toward the door. "I'm sorry, Connie. I'm not sure I was very reassuring to your parents' concerns."

Poised at the door to take inventory of the cardboard Pearl was gathering, Peridot nodded in agreement. The motion threw beads of seawater from the soggy pink ball cap she still insisted on wearing. "I concur. Most of the failure is Pearl's fault," said Peridot, completely missing Pearl's glare. "But I can't help but feel some small responsibility nonetheless. My aspirations for the perfect summer camp overreached my current means to construct it on such short notice. But it's like they say: even Homeworld wasn't built in a day."

Connie pressed her lips together. It would be easy, and probably cathartic, to blame Peridot's enthusiasm for this disaster. But that wasn't the real problem. Nor was the problem Amethyst's shapeshifting, Pearl's snacks, or the life-changing amount of money Garnet had fished out of the ocean. The real problem was that her parents still refused to deal with this part of her life.

"They always do this to me!" The words burst out of Connie, exploding through the tight line of her mouth. She thumped her fists against the upholstery and snarled, "They always promise they'll listen, that I'll get to be part of the decision. Then they go off and do whatever they want on their own." She didn't want to, but she couldn't help looking to Steven and adding, "And now your dad is doing it too!"

"I'm sure my dad just…" Steven trailed off, looking down at his hands in his lap. Then he curled them into fists and thumped the couch as Connie had. "No, you're right. It's not fair! You should be part of the decision."

Kicking her legs, Connie rolled backwards off the couch, landing in a swirl of her own skirt. "I can't just sit back and let them decide this without me," she declared.

Steven leapt after her, pumping his arms. "Then let's do something about it!"

She grinned, feeling his enthusiasm spark her own back to life. "You have a plan?" she asked.

"Yeah." He rubbed at his chin, his brow furrowed. "They're gonna come back from their lunch not only fully nourished, but with lots of reasonable-sounding arguments, saying things like 'child endangerment' or 'twice the daily allotment of sodium.'"

"Boo!" jeered Amethyst.

"But if we know what their reasons will be, we can be prepared," Steven said.

Connie's eyes widened. "That's exactly what they do on my favorite cable family legal dramedy, _Lawyer-In-Law_. It's called 'opposition research.' Steven, that's brilliant! We can spy on them and take apart their argument before they even make it! Let's do it!"

Whirling to the door, his fist raised in triumph, Steven declared, "Then the time has come to reassemble the Secret Team!"

"No." The word thudded out of Garnet, who leaned in the corner of the room with her arms folded over her chest. She'd been so quiet for so long that Connie had forgotten about her entirely, and jumped at the sound of her voice. "No secret teams."

"Oh." Steven lowered his fist. "Well, can we be regular spies?"

Garnet shrugged one shoulder. "It won't go how you think it will," she warned, her visor glinting.

Ominous portents aside, Connie knew it was still her best chance. "We have to try," she said.

"Anyone else want to help?" asked Steven. "Pearl? Amethyst?"

Pearl shook her head as she hefted a bundle of cardboard trees. There were still a great deal of corrugated forest remaining in the house for her to disassemble. "I need to clean up all of this," she said.

"Here, Pearl. Let me help." Peridot shouldered the thick stack of cardboard from Pearl's arms, and then lugged it to the circle of stones in the middle of the floor. With a heave, she tossed the cardboard trees into the circle, crushing the cardboard flames and logs inside of it. "Maybe one day," the little engineer murmured, holding her hands out to bask in its imaginary heat as her imaginary trees vanished into imaginary smoke.

Pearl blinked owlishly at the pantomime. "Um, Peridot?" she said.

"Do you mind?" Peridot snarled over her shoulder, tears brimming behind her visor. "I'm saying goodbye to my dream, you insensitive clod!"

"Yeah, I'm good here too," Amethyst said, her cheek pressed to the floor as she idly slid across the room. She happened upon a pair of broken crackers next to a marshmallow, some chocolate, and a set of tongs. "Oh, sweet! Floor S'mores!" Her tongue lashed out and drew the entire lot into her mouth. The tongs crunched loudly while she chewed.

"Keeping the team small will probably be stealthier anyway," Connie said. "Okay, Steven. It's your plan. Where do we start?"

"Dad will want to impress your parents, so he'll take them to the nicest restaurant in town," Steven mused aloud, his eyes narrowing in thought.

* * *

After nearly a minute of Steven's uninterrupted knocking, the door opened, and Jenny Pizza peered down at the two expectant spies. "Steven? And you're…Connie, right? Pineapple anchovies? What are you two doing back here?" the pretty teen asked, opening the back door of Fish Stew Pizza wider.

Steven stood with Connie, pressed close to the building to use the restaurant's dumpster as cover from all the prying eyes that they hadn't seen on their way to the restaurant. "Jenny, is my Dad in there?"

"Yeah, he sat down with some other couple and ordered already," said Jenny. Her gaze lingered on Connie, and realization sparked in her eyes.

"Great! We're here on super-serious business," Steven announced.

The Pizza twin cocked a fist on her hip. "C'mon, Steven. Your 'pizza inspector' gag was funny the first six times, but Daddy said we're not allowed to give you any more free slices."

Even the thought of food made Connie's stomach rattle. She shook her head and insisted, "We're not here for that, I promise. We need to spy on my parents and Mister Universe while they come up with reasons to keep me at home this summer because they're worried about me even though I'm worried about bringing the house down on top of them because I don't know what I'm doing!"

Jenny blinked and tilted her head. "Mm'kay, I missed most of that, but I'm getting a general vibe of teenage rebellion here. Yeah?" When Connie and Steven nodded emphatically, she stepped back and motioned for them to follow her. "Cool. Stay low and don't touch anything edible. We still got a health code rating to maintain."

Steven quickly wiped the grin off his face, looking stern as he turned to Connie and intoned, "We're in."

Crouching, Connie slunk after Steven, following Jenny through the too-tiny kitchen of the restaurant. Kiki was switching pies in the wall of pizza ovens, and gave them all a quizzical look, but said nothing when Jenny offered her a thumbs-up as explanation. Connie wondered if it was some kind of silent sibling communication, a _twintuition_ , or if they had simply snuck any number of people into the kitchen before.

At Jenny's unspoken direction, Connie and Steven took up positions behind a shelf of dry goods that blocked them from view of the front of the restaurant. By standing on tiptoe and carefully, gingerly separating a pair of large cans of industrial-grade tomato paste, Connie was able to peer over the front counter, past the register, to the checkered tables of the dining area. A stray glance made her accidentally and permanently memorize the ingredients of that tomato paste, which gave her even less of an appetite than before.

Straining all of the nascent spycraft she had gleaned from television and movies, Connie was able to locate their targets, who happened to be seated at the one occupied table in the entire restaurant. Greg sat with his back to the kitchen, his expression a mystery but his voice loud and clear. "—the best pizza from here to Empire City!"

Filling out the rest of the table, Connie's parents were in clear view. Her mother sipped reluctantly at a glass of cloudy water as she raised an eyebrow at Greg. "Better than Original Famous Original Ray's?" she said, sounding unconvinced.

Greg lifted his hands and laughed. "Hey, I said 'to' Empire City, not 'in' Empire City. But you didn't hear that from me. The staff here can get pretty vindictive," he said loudly enough for the entire kitchen to hear him.

Jenny and Kiki offered perfunctory glares from the kitchen. Connie watched her parents offer equally perfunctory smiles, but she recognized the worry hidden behind the expressions. Already she could see the shape of the argument they would levy against her in the fight to come. It lit an anger inside of her, seeing them ready to conspire against her, but she tamped down on the flames. She had to remain objective, and dispassionate, and logical. Any signs of a tantrum would be grounds for them to disqualify anything she said.

Evidently Greg could see what Connie saw, because his posture eased back in his chair. He let the uncomfortable silence simmer as Jenny ran a steaming pizza out to the table. Once the twin had retreated back to the kitchen, the old rocker dished out slices for his guests first.

"You know," Greg said, dishing out his own slices last, "all that stuff you saw today, that's not even close to what it's normally like. The Gems just have a natural flair for putting on a show. I think they got a little too excited, that's all."

"They definitely seem excitable." Connie watched her father collect a fork and knife for his pizza, and she cringed in secret as he began to cut a slice into bite sizes.

Her mother, at least, had the decency to eat the pizza with her hands. "I have to warn you, Greg," she said, poised at her slice's tip, "if you're looking to wine and dine us, I have some experience with that tactic. Pharma companies try it all the time. Granted, they never thought to try pizza." She took a bite, and after a few thoughtful chews, she nodded in satisfaction.

Greg chuckled, and pulled at his slice, drawing a long string of mozzarella back to his plate. "I was never much of a salesman anyway. You can ask the boxes and boxes of Mister Universe merch I still have if you don't believe me." His head tilted, and an apologetic note entered his voice as he added, "And to be honest, I don't really need to make any sales pitch here. Connie needs help, and the Gems are the one to give it to her."

The stunned silence from Connie's parents boomed, swallowing the ambient noise of the restaurant.

Lifting his hands, Greg said quickly, "Hey, sorry. That sounded way less harsh in my head. Like I said, I'm bad at this. But…the fact is, Connie has a Gem inside of her, and there's only one bunch I know to go to for something like that."

Connie's father set his knife and fork aside. His face hardened in a way Connie had rarely seen. "When you put it like that, it sounds pretty grim," he admitted.

"It's not like that at all!" Greg said quickly. "The Gems think the world of Connie. We all do! And we want to do whatever we can to help her get a handle on her new situation."

A heavy look passed between Connie's parents. Then, in a quiet voice, her mother said, "We haven't completely given up hope that the gemstone can be removed. And now, with Jade…gone…"

Connie felt her eyes burn. Looking down, she found her hand at her chest, her fingers curled around the square stone under her dress. Steven gave her a look of concern, but she tightened her mouth and shook her head.

"Well, the Gems might be able to help with that too. Whatever you decide, we'll all be there to help you and Connie through this. And even if you don't think Connie should stay here, that's okay. Look how far she's come just from visiting on weekends. Pearl says she's a natural with that sword!"

The shelf in front of Connie began to tremble. As her palms began to ache, she realized that she was clutching the metal shelving, her skin blanching at the hard, sharp edges. She was more than furious, barely able to keep herself from leaping across the counter and exploding at the table of grown-ups. Her parents were acting exactly as she feared, exactly as they had promised they wouldn't: they were making decisions for her, without her. And now Greg was chiming in with the same tune. She could feel her grip on herself slipping as her whole body coiled to act.

"But…" Greg continued.

Connie's breath caught in her throat, and she froze.

Twisting a napkin in his hands, Greg looked down and said, "Gem stuff is messy. Like, 'rebuilding your house' messy, even when there isn't something stirring up trouble. Which, from what Steven tells me, there is. That's why the Gems live so far away from everyone else. Well, one of the reasons."

Her father tapped his fork against his plate nervously, eyes distant with memory. "We already had a bit of an incident," he admitted.

 _Windcident,_ Connie corrected him in silence.

"Those will happen," Greg agreed, nodding. "They should happen. It means she's figuring it all out. But that's gonna happen again, and if Steven's any indication, it could take a long time before Connie has a good handle on what she can do. Being somewhere where she doesn't have to be afraid of hurting anyone or anything can help a lot with that."

"Connie would never…" her mother started to snap, but then bit down on her words. Deep creases lined her forehead as her gaze fell, her eyes flickering in thought.

"To be honest, though, it's not safety or elbow room that I'm thinking about. And I'm sorry if I'm stepping over the line for saying so, but…" Greg paused, and sighed. "I think kids need space to figure out the big stuff. I needed it for my music. Steven needed it for his Gem stuff. Maybe Connie needs that too. Because nobody else can figure this out for her. Not the Gems. Not us. Not Steven, either, and he's been there. Or at least some version of 'there.' That's why I think some time away could be really good for her."

It was a long, silent moment before her father said, "I think so too."

Her mother's eyes snapped back into focus, widening in horror at his words. Panic threaded her tone as she said, "Doug, no! You cannot make me the bad guy this time. Not for this."

Connie rocked backwards in shock, and watched her father doing the same. "Priyanka!" he started.

But her mother shook her head, cutting him off. Panic consumed any remaining authority in her tone. "You know how much this means to her. After the attack, after Jade… I can't be the bad guy! It isn't fair, Doug!" Her palms slapped the tabletop, making the plates jump.

Her father cupped his hand over her mother's. "Hey," he said quietly, and squeezed. "Hey, that isn't going to happen. We're together on this: if both of us don't agree, then it doesn't happen, and we both tell her."

None of the tension left her mother's body, but her eyes lost some of their wild, white panic.

Squeezing again, he continued, "Priyanka, she was eating back there. She was laughing."

"I…didn't notice that," her mother said in a small voice. "But Connie is going to need structure, and direction, and…"

"Love of my life," her father murmured, using a featherlight voice Connie had only ever heard from him a handful of times, "you are the smartest person I have ever met. But our daughter summoned a tornado in our living room. We have no idea what she needs right now."

Her mother's mouth hardened into a thin line.

"Maybe that stone in her falls off tomorrow. Maybe she becomes a wind goddess who conquers the world with storm and sword. Maybe she becomes a doctor who runs a lucrative kite rental business on the weekend." Her father smiled gently, leaning closer to his wife. "Right now, Connie misses Jade, and she's hurting. So maybe she just needs some time away on a beach to have fun with her best friend." His smile straining, he added, "Even if that best friend has a worrying lack of spare bedrooms available for her."

A snorting laugh cracked her mother's façade. She looked away, pretending to be annoyed so she could hide her smile, like she always did. The familiar tic turned her face toward where Connie was hidden, and Connie went completely still. Tears glistened in her mother's eyes, refusing to fall, but real all the same.

"You're right," her mother said, pretending to massage her eyelids so she could dry them in secret. "Of course you're right. I just… I thought we would have more time before all of 'this' became her life. I didn't think… I didn't think she'd be gone so soon."

Greg, who had been trying to somehow eat pizza and not exist near the conversation, gave up on doing both, and set his plate aside. "I don't know if this will help—probably the opposite—but it's okay to not be okay with it." His rough red knuckles worried against the tablecloth as his head tilted down. "Steven needed the Gems too. He needed that space and closeness with them. But letting him go to live with them is the hardest thing I've ever done. It's still hard some days, even with him just down the street. And knowing it was right doesn't stop me from missing the way it used to be."

A sniffle beside her made Connie glance at Steven. His hand covered his mouth, and tears streamed from his eyes.

"And hey," Greg continued, brightening, "none of this is set in stone. It's just for the summer, and if you don't think it's working out…"

Her mother nodded. "Thank you, Greg. That actually does make me feel better."

But she didn't look like she felt better to Connie. She looked like she was on the verge of tears, and clung to her husband's hand lest the edge overtake her. Connie stared through the canned marinara at her mother's glistening eyes. Her chest tightened as she tried to reconcile what she was seeing of the most unyielding, most stubborn person she had ever known looking frightened at the idea of Connie leaving. How could her mother be afraid of Connie's disappointment? Of being the _bad guy_? Mothers were supposed to say _no_ to everything. Mothers reveled in the power to say _no_! At least, that's how it had always seemed to Connie.

Maybe saying _no_ wasn't as fun as her mother had always made it look. But it didn't make her a bad guy. Her mother had to know that. Didn't she?

Stray hairs drifted across Connie's face. She smelled a melody of fresh pizza in the warm breeze, and saw Steven's curly nest of hair buffeting atop his head as he cried silent tears.

Kiki had to slap her hand onto a stack of napkins to keep them from sweeping away in the sudden draft. "Jenny!" she snapped, "You can't keep leaving the back door open!"

Jenny motioned to the back door, which was still closed, and then answered her sister with a rude gesture. Guiltily, Connie bit down on her lip and closed her eyes. She summoned a litany of her father's worst jokes from memory and concentrated on their terribleness until the wind died down again.

By the time Connie had subdued the breeze, Steven had dried his eyes, and their parents had settled the table, letting Jenny box most of the pizza for them to take. While Connie's parents left to wait outside, Greg took the box to the counter to settle the bill he had gently wrestled away from the Maheswarans. He'd only won the battle after promising to let them treat him after they'd found enough historical collectors and museums to help them convert Connie's scholarship booty into a more modern currency.

Connie and Steven both stood perfectly still in their hiding spots as Greg paid. "And the calzones?" Greg asked, laying a handful of bills on the counter.

Jenny added two cardboard packages on top of the pizza box as Kiki collected the cash. "One Supreme, and one pepperoni with mushrooms, hot and ready," the twin promised.

Greg grinned and added a pair of twenties to the counter separate from the bill. Neither teen was shy about taking the proffered tip. "You two saving for anything good?"

"College," Kiki answered.

"Guitar strings," Jenny answered.

He nodded to both. As the old rocker collected his food, Connie allowed herself the tiniest sigh in relief.

Then he stopped and added to the twins, "I'm going to take these two the long way around the block, give them time to decompress from all of that. Please tell the kids they can still beat us home, but they'll have to run if they don't want to get spotted."

Connie's sigh turned into a hiccup.

Jenny didn't miss a beat, blinking in confusion at him. "Sorry, who are you talking about?" she asked.

Greg grinned and winked. "Good for you. Don't trust anyone over thirty." Then, boxes in hand, he left to join the other parents. True to his word, he led them in the wrong direction across the window, taking the Maheswarans further down the boardwalk.

Connie stared through the shelf, watching them go. In a minute, she and Steven would need to leave through the back. They would sprint down the beach to avoid being seen, and would have to pretend to be delighted and surprised by the adults' decision, and she would force down a calzone with her favorite ingredients just to make sure her parents worried a little less about her.

But for now, for just one moment, Connie let her heart ache at the melancholy she saw through the window in her mother's features. Of all the reasons for her to say _no_ , Connie never thought that the one reason to come closest to winning would be that her mother would miss her over the summer.

And now that she realized how much she would miss her parents as well, she nearly wished they had won. Not quite, but almost.


	5. Welcome Home!

"So…I guess that's everything," Connie heard her mother say.

Standing on the deck of the beach house, Connie stared down at her entire life distilled into a pair of duffel bags sitting between her parents' feet. Behind them, the family sedan sat parked on the beach, its rear axel scrunched low on its suspension thanks to the crate of old coins tucked in the trunk. Her mother's voice betrayed a surprise that Connie could feel tingling in her own stomach too.

The day before, with its faux camp and awful spy fiasco, somehow felt as though it had happened a lifetime ago. But the time since had flashed past them all at ludicrous speed. An awkward car ride home, and awkward final family dinner, an awkwardly tense family meeting in Connie's room to decide what she would need and wear for the rest of the summer, and a night of staring at the ceiling above her bed had all passed in the blink of an eye. Now it was morning again, and already time to say goodbye.

Connie shook away the dramatic notions and forced a smile for her parents. Steven and the Gems stood behind her, all hopefully smiling for real. "Yup!" Connie said, sounding casual even as the sound of her own heartbeat pounded in her ears.

"Are you sure you packed your—" Her mother started to bend toward the bags as if to open them and reinspect their contents for a fourth time. Connie saw her father stop the motion with a light touch to her mother's arm. Flustered, her mother straightened, grimacing at the color in her cheeks. "Right. Then we'll talk to you tonight?"

"Every night before bed," Connie said, reciting her promise. "Unless I'm on a mission where there aren't any cell towers. But I'll text you before and after every mission."

"Good," her mother said, clearly feeling anything but.

Her father rescued them from the uncomfortable silence. "Connie," he said sternly, "what are you going to be?"

Connie straightened, folding her hands in front of her. "I will be a good student who is mindful of her teachers but not afraid to ask questions," she said.

It was hard for her to keep a straight face. Her father seemed to have similar problems as his cheek twitched. "And what are you going to do?" he continued, still stern, but only just.

The twinkle in his eye broker her, and she grinned. "Kick a socially responsible amount of butt," she promised him.

His arms spread wide as he said, "Darn tootin'."

Connie leapt into his hug, burying her face in his shirt as she squeezed him as tightly as she could. The smell of his aftershave and his light sweat from the warm summer morning etched itself into her memory, wrapped tightly around the feeling of his strong arms lifting her up from the deck, and the tickle of his breath on her scalp, and the way his heartbeat raced against her ear pressed to his chest. Of all the memories Jade's gemstone could make permanent, she hoped that this could be one of them. "Love you, Dad," she murmured.

"Love you," he whispered into her hair. They both pretended that his voice was thick and rough from the force of her hug.

When Connie finally pulled away, she found her mother waiting half a step away, fidgeting. Those calm, clever, strong doctorly hands that had once orchestrated every detail of Connie's life now wrung themselves uncertainly, as though her mother had no idea of what to do with them. "If you…" her mother began, but stopped herself, closing her eyes in a sharp, silent curse. Then she started again, softer still, "I hope you…I mean, I want you to…"

Connie crashed into her mother, wrapping her in an embrace that made her arms ache. "I love you so much, Mom," she said fiercely.

A shudder ran through the fearsome woman, who held Connie tightly and pressed a kiss into the top of her head. "I love you," her mother croaked, sounding as though one more word would shatter her.

And with that, Connie knew she didn't need Jade's gemstone to immortalize the moment. No power could possibly make her forget the feeling, the scent, the warmth, of her mother's embrace. It would stay with her, always.

Wiping at his face, Connie's father looked to Amethyst, and said, "I gotta know: what on Earth is a burrito machine?"

Amethyst started to answer, but then stopped. Her brow furrowed and her bright eyes danced in thought for a moment, and then she said, "You know, I never asked. Peridot just offered it up to sweeten the deal, and I didn't even think about it. I just said yes."

Nodding, he said, "I probably would have too."

There were more awkward words, and worried looks, and long walks to a car that was parked at the bottom of the stairs. Then came the rumbling of an engine, the belch of exhaust, tires grinding against sand, straining under the weight of pirate booty. Through it all, Connie kept smiling and waving. She didn't stop until the last glimpse of that sedan as it disappeared around the far side of the cliff.

Connie thought her heart would ease once the long goodbye was finally over. Instead, it felt like the sanguine drumbeat inside of her would shake her apart. She didn't know what was wrong, or how she felt. Afraid? Excited?

Unmoored.

Her campaign to spend her summer at the beach house hadn't felt real even throughout all the packing the night before. The anticipation had been giddy, dreamlike. But the dream was reality now. And for the first time in her life, Connie's parents had left her somewhere with no immediate plan to come get her later. Connie's life was hers now, completely free. Terrifyingly free.

Before the sound of her own heartbeat could deafen her, and before the winds stirring around her could gather in earnest, she felt Steven slip his hand into hers. An instant later, Pearl's hand rested atop Connie's shoulder. The simple touches were enough to keep her from feeling as though she might float away.

Connie threaded her fingers with Steven's and squeezed. She rested her other hand atop Pearl's as she stared at the empty cliffside. She was untethered now, perhaps even moderately unsupervised, at least compared to life before. But she wasn't unmoored. She wasn't alone.

* * *

After a sufficient period of hand-holding and staring at the ocean to quell any panic attacks, Connie followed Steven into the house to settle into her new circumstances. A Quartz and a gentleman both, Steven had no problem hefting her bags for her. Pearl remained outside, intent on making one last sweep of the temple's exterior. She had been finding more cardboard animals left over from Peridot's camp, and wanted to make sure the corrugated species went extinct.

Connie might have walked into that house a hundred times before, but this time felt different. _I live here now_ , she thought. Her eyes trialed across the kitchen and furniture that were all familiar, but still not hers. _I live here now_ , her mind wailed in animal panic, the same way it used to when she had been a child entering some new house thousands of miles away from her old house after yet another cross-country relocation.

Then her eyes found the warp pad and the temple door at the back, mysterious and alien still, but also now hers in some small way. _I live here now!_

Steven kicked his sandals off with expert marksmanship, slapping them against the far corner of the couch as he settled Connie's bags onto the coffee table. "Welcome home!" he sang, and shoved aside a basket of clean laundry on the couch so he could sit.

Hearing the word aloud triggered a world of reactions inside Connie. Her grin spread wider, and without realizing it she shucked her shoes and stowed them by the door, perfectly parallel. Then she skipped on bare feet to the coffee table to work at the zippers of her overstuffed luggage.

"It's probably too late to say this, but are you sure you won't get sick of me?" She meant for the question to sound teasing, but the silence that followed it gave her pause. "Steven?"

When she looked up at him, she found him staring toward the door, his brow crinkling. Then he caught her glance and smiled. "No way! This is going to be an amazing summer." He retrieved the old foot locker his dad had left her and heaved it to the tabletop.

Relieved, Connie began unloading her clothes bag into the locker. The rust caking it had been scrubbed away, probably by Pearl, and it was now pristine. "I think so too." Her hand paused to trace the square stone's edge through her shirt. "There's so much I have to learn about Jade's Gem…"

"And there's breakfasts at The Big Donut," Steven added, bending to collect his sandals, "and the sandcastle contest next month, and Beach-A-Palooza after that…" He wandered to the door and neatly arranged his sandals next to Connie's shoes, nudging them until they looked properly aligned.

Connie took the opportunity with Steven being across the room to scoop out her underwear from the bag in one overstuffed motion and cram it all under a stack of jeans. By the time he came back, all of her more embarrassing necessities were hidden away. "And we have to track down Pyrite, and Flint, and Milky, and figure out what Shard wants on Earth," she added.

He pulled over the basket of laundry he had shoved aside and began folding his clothes at the opposite end of the coffee table. Connie couldn't help but notice that he kept his own underwear hidden at the bottom of the basket, wadded up and almost out of sight. "Right. Garnet said they were looking for something. I'm guessing it'll be better if we find it first, whatever it is."

Her clothes stowed, Connie started on the second bag, removing her violin case, a few packets of folding paper, and the tight bundle of her training clothes she'd kept separate from the rest of her wardrobe. Last of all, she took out a stack of books, which she handled oh-so-carefully to keep herself from accidentally reading the covers as she stuffed them next to her underwear in the locker. Then she stood with her hands on the locker's edge, staring down at her life, formerly in bags, now in a box. "I'm not even sure where to start," Connie admitted to Steven.

The last of his shorts became a neatly folded rectangle, which he added to the stacked and organized basket of laundry. Brushing his hands clean, Steven shrugged and said, "Lunch?"

As Connie smiled and followed him into the kitchen, Pearl came through the front door, humming to herself in satisfaction. A soggy cardboard owl wearing a mortarboard and holding a cardboard lollipop was tucked under her arm. Walking to the tempo of her aimless song, Pearl wandered to the far corner of the couch and stooped. When her hand met bare floor, she stopped humming, and frowned at the empty spot on the hardwood. Her eyes trailed back to the pairs of shoes at the door, and then over to the basket of neatly folded laundry on the couch.

Head tilting at the basket, Pearl's frown deepened with puzzlement.

* * *

The remains of lunch grew cold on the plate in front of Connie. Per the chef's recommendation, she had selected the artisanal chicken fingers accompanied by oven-baked fries and served with a reduction of New England Catsup. She wasn't sure if it counted as a reduction just because she used less of it, but the food still tasted fine, and more of the meal ended up inside of her than in front of her, so she considered it a win. Her chef, glad to reduce the remaining total of ketchup, was cleaning his plate with his last fry.

Conversation had been spare during the meal, and Steven had done most of the talking, suggesting all of the things they might do in the coming days and weeks and months. Connie was having trouble keeping it all straight, and mostly just nodded at each new fun thing Steven could imagine. Eventually, he seemed to pick up on how overwhelming it must have been, and swirled his last fry through ketchup in silence.

Then Steven gasped, and cried, "A li—"

He croaked, clutching at his throat, and his face turned bright red. Connie scrambled off her stool and pounded on his back with a flat hand until he coughed up a half-chewed red fry back onto his plate. "Are you okay?" she asked, and rubbed at his shoulder.

Once the air was back in him, Steven wheezed, "A list!" He abandoned his plate at the counter to collect a notepad and pen. "If you don't know where to start, we should make a list of everything you want to do this summer. Then we can figure out where to start and how to do it!"

Connie brightened. "That's a great idea," she said. But her face dimmed as she recalled what happened when she had accidentally looked at the back of the ketchup bottle. _Tomato concentrate. Sugar. Vinegar. Salt. Less than two percent organic spices._ "Um, could you write it down for me?" she asked as she gathered her dishes.

"Sure!" Steven said, and stood poised with pen at paper.

The beach house had no dishwasher, but Pearl kept one of those sponge wands with the soap in the handle next to the sink. Connie's eye drifted across the embossed logo on the wand handle—Magic Sponge—and her mind flashed back to every cleaning commercial she had seen over the past few days, which was collectively much more than she would have guessed. Shaking the flashback away, Connie began to wash her dishes, and said, "Top of the list: I want to be able to read or watch something without my brain vomiting up a playlist of everything connected to what I'm seeing."

Steven tapped the pen on the pad. His tongue poked through his teeth as he concentrated. "We should come up with a name for it. Right? I mean, I guess 'reading power' works, but it feels like it's lacking pizazz."

As she scrubbed her plate, watching greasy soap bubbles trail after the wand, Connie thought about how quickly she'd zoomed through her reading list, and how this new ability reserved all of her brain space any time she didn't think about it, and about the awesome cleaning power of _Magic Sponge, The Sponge That Makes Dirt Vanish_ , though that last was involuntary. "Booking," she decided.

"Oh, that's good. Wha—" Steven looked up as he finished writing, and his words stumbled. Hurriedly he collected his own dishes and brought them to the sink, and then found a dish towel so he could dry as Connie washed. "What else?"

She sighed, and the breath sent a plume of soap bubbles wafting out of the sink. The tiny bubbles drifted in front of her, swirling in the gentle puff of her breathing. "I have to get a handle on any more 'windcidents.' Can't go around huffing and puffing people's houses down by accident."

"Okay. What else?" Steven said coaxingly.

Connie shrugged. "I mean, that's all I really need, isn't it? At least as far as power stuff goes. I want to be able to not accidentally destroy stuff just by being around."

His face tightened, and he looked down past his hands toward the hem of his shirt. "It's not just about not destroying stuff, though, right? I mean, that part is pretty important, and honestly it's still kind of hard for the other Gems, now that I think about it. But you should also focus on all the stuff you want to learn to do now that you have a gemstone too."

Connie felt her whole body tighten around the square stone in her chest. She knew what Steven was saying, and she knew he meant well. But that didn't change the truth.

"It's not my gemstone, Steven," she said quietly. As much as she might want to harness the powers of Jade's stone to become the kind of heroic legend she had always dreamed of being, to be the sword-wielding storm goddess her father had joked about the day before, she didn't feel right to want such a thing, or even imagine it happening. Jade hadn't sacrificed herself so Connie could play superhero.

Steven winced, and mumbled, "Sorry."

A pang of guilt made her body coil harder around the stone at his apology. "It's okay, Steven. But the plan before was to remove the stone from my body. Maybe that should still be the goal." She felt sick saying it, but the rational part of her knew it was still true.

"Well…" Steven wiped hard at a dish until his towel squeaked on dry ceramic, his eyes cast down at his hands. "Well, until we can do that, maybe you should still know how it works. Maybe if you understand it better, you can help us figure out why it's in you at all, and…and how we can take it out, if that's what you think is best."

Connie wanted to cheer Steven up from this accidental funk she had dragged them both into. And for all she knew, he was right: knowing more about how Jade's gemstone interacted with her, and learning more about it, might help them remove it later, and would definitely help her not summon a hurricane the next time she sneezed. And maybe, just maybe, if that let her learn how to do all the cool things a Gem like Jade could do as a result…well, maybe that would be okay. Maybe.

"Warping," Connie said, and handed him the last of the dripping silverware. At his questioning glance, she grinned, and said, "I want to learn how to use a warp pad. It's so cool how you guys can go anywhere in the world anytime you want."

Steven hurried to dry and put away their dishes, and then ran back to his pad and began his list. "Yeah! What else?" he cheered.

Her smile widened. "Jumping, definitely. All of the Gems can jump crazy high, can't they?"

"Yup! Well, not so much Peridot, but yeah. C'mon, what else?"

His enthusiasm broke the last of her funk, and with the sink clean, she let herself get swept up in the new mood. "Shapeshifting!"

"Two thumbs way, way up!" Steven raised his hand and, scowling in concentration, he morphed his index finger into a second thumb.

His dysmorphic enthusiasm only lasted a few second before his finger reverted, but it sent her into a fit of giggles. "Totally. I want all the thumbs! I'll be Queen of the Thumb Wars!"

"Now we're talking!" Steven exclaimed.

As he pulled Connie back toward the couch so they could continue building their list, the warp pad chimed, and Pearl materialized from a beam of light with her spear in hand. When she saw the teens, the concerned look on her features evaporated, and so did her weapon. "Hi, there! Is Connie all settled in? Did you eat already?" Pearl called.

"Yes, ma'am," Connie answered. "To both! Steven's helping me think of everything I should learn while I'm here."

"Oh, wonderful!" Pearl said as she moved into the kitchen. "There's nothing quite like the feeling of a fresh new list to…" When she found the counter empty and clean, and likewise the sink, her words trailed off. She surveyed the immaculate room in a slow circle, her eyes narrowing in confusion.

"Everything okay, Pearl? Did you find any sign of the other Gems?" Steven asked.

"Yes," Pearl drawled, still lost in her search for something in the spotless kitchen. Then his other question registered, and she blinked. "Er, I mean, no. Nothing out there at the moment that I can find. I, um, need to go. You kids let me know if you need anything."

"Okay!" Steven called after her as the Gem left in a daze through the temple door. As it sealed shut, he scribbled a new line on the list. "We should add 'getting into the temple' to the list too. You won't have your own room, but if you ever need to get to a bubbled Gem or something…"

"Yeah!" Connie agreed. She wouldn't turn down a chance to explore the tantalizingly mysterious ancient stronghold of Earth's greatest protectors.

Tapping a pen on the pad, Steven said, "This is all just stuff the rest of us can do. What about stuff that only you can do? I mean, stuff that Jade could do?" he asked, correcting himself quickly.

Her brow crinkled. "Wind?" she said.

"And?" he said.

"Wind…blasts?" Connie said, thinking back to the disastrous first meeting between Jade and the Crystal Gems.

"And?" Steven insisted.

She thought about the beach ball Jade had propelled into the stratosphere. "Wind explosions," she said.

"And?" he exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air.

The grim memory of Pyrite's attack in Sanctuary flitted across Connie's thoughts. She remembered the razor-thin bursts of air Jade had used to cut into the massive Quartz. "Wind blades!" Connie shouted.

"That's what I'm talking about!" Steven shouted in kind, springing atop the couch cushion with excitement. "Hang on, I'm going to make a separate column for wind stuff."

* * *

Barefoot and clad in her pajamas, Connie waited outside the bathroom door, watching the sky change colors as the day came to an end. She bounced on her toes, too excited to keep still. A huge grin split her features in half.

The list was as complete as she and Steven could make it in just one day. It looped through her mind, indelibly stamped into her memory like everything else she read, but she was glad to have it. There were nearly three dozen things she and Steven had come up with, some of them real things that Jade or one of the other Gems could do, and some of them wild flights of fancy invented by one of them, as if Connie might dare the wind itself to do something impossibly cool.

"Next time I blow down the living room, it'll be on purpose," she promised herself. Still bouncing on her toes, she threw practice jabs in the air, savoring the tingle of excitement in her nerves. Her first day at the beach had passed by in a blur, and if she wasn't careful, the rest of her summer could fly by just as quickly. But she had a plan now. She had goals. And she—

—watched a gust of air rattle the screen door from the inside. And then another. And another. By the fourth, she realized that the wind was coming off her fists. Stuffing her hands under her armpits, she hugged herself and waited, growing still. Thankfully, the screen stopped rattling.

The bathroom door opened and Steven emerged from a cloud of steam, dressed in his own PJs and wearing a towel wrap in his hair. He grinned at Connie, not catching the worry in her face before she hid it behind a smile. Then his eyes bugged, and he backpedaled, slamming the bathroom closed again. As the door shut, Connie caught a glimpse of more towels on the floor, and an uncapped tube of toothpaste on the counter, and a messy array of shampoos and conditioners and body washes littering every conceivable surface. Hurried sounds of rustling came through the door as he called, "Just a minute!"

Connie backed away, her mouth pressed in frustration. Something brushed her shoulder, and she whirled, surprised to find Pearl lurking behind her suddenly. The Gem waited with a rictus smile on her face as she watched the bathroom door. "Pearl?" Connie yelped.

"Hi, Connie! Did you have a nice dinner?" Pearl asked in a thready voice, her gaze never budging from the closed bathroom door.

The last time Connie had glimpsed Pearl was just after dinner, when she and Steven had been deep in thinking of awesome wind tricks. Pearl had stalked out of the temple in something of a tizzy, taken one look at the sauce pans they had used to cook their macaroni soaking in the sink and the rest of their dishes already cleaned, and then fled back into the temple without a word.

"Yes?" Connie ventured.

"Good! Good." Pearl looked like a lioness coiled to pounce on some helpless gazelle. And when the door opened a moment later, she did pounce, bowling past Steven through the door frame. "Just a moment, Connie, let me—OH, MY STARS!"

Steven caught himself, dizzy from the Gem's rush. "Uh, hi? Pearl, is everything…?" By the time he had stopped his eyes spinning, Pearl was already vanishing back through the temple door on the far side of the house. "Huh. Okay. Well, the bathroom's all yours now, roomie!" Steven told Connie.

Connie leaned past him to find the bathroom straightened up and waiting for her. The counter was clean, the toothpaste capped, and the shampoos and conditioners neatly stacked in a basket next to the tub. He'd even wiped the fog from the mirror, though it was already gathering again in the steamy heat left over from his shower. "Thanks," she said.

Steven's smile faded, and he frowned. "Are you okay?" he asked.

With a start, Connie realized that her fists were still tucked under her armpits. Letting her hands drop, she said, "Yeah, I… I guess I'm just still adjusting."

"Adjusting is good. And it's okay if it takes some time." Steven's gentle smile returned like a sunbeam through parting clouds. Then his eyes trailed down, and his face brightened. "Oh, hey! Is that where that shirt went?"

Connie's stomach plummeted as she put her hand over the yellow star of her shirt, remembering that it was really Steven's shirt in the first place. For all the excuses she had invented to avoid giving him back the borrowed shirt, she had never considered what would happen if she took it with her to live at the beach house, which now seemed unbelievably stupid of her. "Oh! Right." She swallowed guiltily, tugging at the hem of the shirt riding above her navel. "I, um, guess you'll want it back. I can go change."

Steven studied her face intently as she fidgeted. Then he studied the shirt theatrically, humming and rubbing his chin. Finally, he leaned back and shook his head. "Wait, no. I must have been wrong. This shirt is definitely yours. My mistake."

She rolled her eyes. "Steven…"

But he remained adamant. "Trust me, I know my own shirts like the back of my pants. In fact…"

He ran to the kitchen and returned with a permanent marker. Bidding Connie to hold still, he stood behind her on his tiptoes. Connie felt a gentle touch move her hair aside, then fish out the tag of the shirt from its collar. The astringent smell of permanent ink kissed her nose, and then she heard the cap return to the marker, and her hair fell back into place.

"There. I put a 'C' on it so it won't get mixed up in the laundry. Not that it would, since it's so obviously not mine."

Connie felt her cheeks aching with the force of her smile as she turned back to him. "Thank you, Steven. You're a really good host."

"Why, thank you," he said, and curtseyed.

She ran her hands down the front of her shirt, smoothing the cheery yellow star as her stomach rose back up, helped aloft by a smattering of butterflies as she considered her best friend. "Is there anything I can do? I mean, to be a good guest?" she asked.

"What? No way!" he said. "You're a great guest."

"Sure, but…" She struggled to keep her knowing grin in check as she glanced at his sandals by the door. "It's like in _Beauty and the Beast_. The old one, the cartoon. Do you remember the scene where Beast couldn't use a spoon, so Belle ate porridge from the bowl like he did so he didn't feel embarrassed?"

Steven's eyes sparkled. "I love that part!"

Connie knew full well that he did. "Belle did that so Beast would feel comfortable, even though she was his guest. So is there any way I can eat my porridge that would make you more comfortable?"

"Did you know that Beast's real name is Adam?"

"Steven…" Connie said reproachfully.

He shook his head. "Seriously, I can't think of anything. This is great!"

"Nothing? You can't think of even one little thing?" Connie teased.

"Not even the tiniest anything," he promised, crossing his heart.

"Because it sure would be 'neat' if I could think of something to do as a way to thank you for all of this," Connie said, leaning on the one word as hard as she could.

Steven's face underwent a brief war of uncertainty before he finally relented. "Well, there is one thing," he admitted, and winced in anticipation.

She made her face solemn, hiding her smile again. "Name it."

"We kind of—and it's not your fault, since you aren't usually here all the time!" he said quickly. "But we kind of have a looser vibe around here. Just about certain things. So maybe you'd have an easier time adjusting if you were just a little, teensier, tiny, itty-bitty bit more…"

"…messy?" she supplied.

He held his thumb and forefinger a hair's breadth apart. "I mean, maybe just a little bit."

Connie wandered back toward the couch, pretending to be lost in thought. Her hand came to rest on the edge of her open foot locker still resting on the coffee table. "Messier, huh? You mean, like this?"

And she snatched up one of her folded shirts from the locker, wadding it up in her fist and hurling it at Steven in one fluid motion.

Steven rocked backwards under the surprise attack, his shocked face disappearing behind the shirt wrapped around his head. By the time he pulled the shirt from his face, Connie had already armed herself with an armload of shirts, socks, and pants, and was strafing across the room with another salvo flying at him. He grinned, ducking a pair of rolled-up socks, and sprinted to the couch, where his basket of folded laundry had been left. "Oh, it's on now!" he crowed, and scooped out half the basket's contents.

She and Steven ran circles around each other, trading sartorial missiles and filling the house to the rafters with a storm of giggles. Furniture became cover, and then obstacles as they leapt and bounded, turning the room into a ridiculous battlefield.

As their laundry fight raged on, with spent ammo grabbed off the floor to be reused by both sides, the temple door parted. "—telling you, something is terribly wrong!" Pearl insisted, dragging Garnet and Amethyst each by an arm into the house. "The children are—Oh!" When she saw the laundry arcing through the air, littering floor and furniture, the graceful Gem froze in shock.

"Aw, sweet!" Amethyst shook off Pearl's numb grasp and charged into the fray. She leapt and blurred her form into white light, expanding into an enormous crocheted sweater made from thick purple fibers. The arms of the sweater snaked out to wrestle with Connie and Steven, and the hem of the sweater produced a lanky purple tongue as it flapped open to cry, "Banzai!"

"Looks fine to me," Garnet said.

Pearl answered with a long sigh of relief, sagging backwards against Garnet's chest.


	6. Half-Hollow

Connie sat with her knees drawn up to her chest as she watched the tide climb up the beach to nip at her bare toes. The water was dark in the clear night, and it colored the sand in front of her with a trace of white foam. Overhead, the entire universe loomed, a million-million-million possibilities, each one a point of light more brilliant than it ever could have been from her bedroom window.

When she stared up at the sky, it felt like she would fall up and away from the ground. The sensation of living at the edge of the world like this thrilled her, terrified her. Part of her wanted to fall just to see what would happen. Would she lose herself in eternity? Would she find herself? Find a new self?

She was up way past her bedtime. Anything could happen.

But one thought anchored her to the ground. She touched the heavy weight beneath her throat, letting her fingers trace its boxy shape as they had a hundred times before. And each time she did, she could feel the weight's true shape, the way it twisted and curled inside of her to form the same five words it would always be: _it should have been me_. She wasn't supposed to be here, but she was.

She knew how excited Steven was to teach her all about having a Gem, about _being_ a Gem. But Connie was never supposed to be a Gem, and she could never forget that. Not as long as she carried Jade's gemstone, and remembered that a Gem had given her life so that Connie could be there. It was hard to let herself be excited too, when she thought about the promise she had made to Jade that she hadn't been allowed to keep.

But she wanted to be excited. She wanted to learn all about being a Gem. She had wanted to learn everything there was to know about the Gems ever since that day Steven had caught her in his bubble. He had saved her life too, and brought so much more into her life than she ever knew possible.

Jade had only wanted one thing for as long as Connie had known her, and that was to be free of Connie's squishy, sloshy, gooshy human body. But keeping that promise, making that happen now, wouldn't do Jade any good. It would invalidate everything she and Steven had worked for to build their amazing summer together. It couldn't bring Jade back.

…could it?

Chasing the tail of her own thoughts, Connie stared out at the ocean. Her gaze flitted through the starlight dancing in the waves. Even with no moon, the water was bright and alive, reflecting the universe back at itself. And that made it possible for her to spot a shape bobbing far off from the shore.

Connie shot to her feet. For half a breath, she worried that it might be a swimmer caught in the undertow. But with a second's panicked observation, she realized that the shape was far too small to be a person. It was a square corner cresting the surface with each passing wave.

Curiosity tugged her a step closer, and wet sand crept between her toes. That object could have been any piece of flotsam. She and Steven had found umpteen hundred curios of refuse washed up in his front yard. But something told her that this was no pizza box lost to the tide. This was something important.

She bit her lip. It wouldn't be safe for her to swim it. Perhaps she could wake Steven, or knock on the temple door until one of the Gems answered. But the object might vanish back into the water by the time she found anyone. So, since she couldn't swim, she stepped out onto the water instead, wobbling atop the gentle rise and fall of the ocean as she trekked out from shore.

With awkward high steps, Connie teetered atop the ocean. It took her a while to gain confidence in her gait, but soon enough she was hopping each wave at a jog. Still, it felt like a long time before she finally reached the object. With the world rolling beneath her, she bent and hooked her fingers around the corner.

A book pulled free from the water, dripping in her hands as she examined the cover. Its color was indistinct, muddled by the starlight, but she could make out one of the words embossed on the cover: _Jade_.

Connie fell to her knees, clutching the book to her chest, where it rattled against the square stone at her throat. As the ocean rolled underneath her, lifting up and soaking through her socks, she looked toward the horizon. More square corners were bobbing in the water. Dozens of shapes. Hundreds. It was impossible to count them all, because the stars grew dark out at the edge of the world, casting everything in shadow.

That's when it occurred to Connie that she might not actually be up past her bedtime after all.

* * *

Connie work with a start. Her whole body seized, rocking her military cot onto two legs before it knocked back to the floor. She stared at the strange ceiling, her chest pumping like a bellows, her heart thundering in her ears, and tried to understand.

No, the ceiling was not strange. This was Steven's house. And that nest of blankets piled on top of a surplus cot was her new bed. She was supposed to be there. Slowly her breathing eased and her heart rate relaxed, and she sagged back into the tangled blankets.

For a long time, Connie tried to relax herself back to sleep. Maybe if she did, she could return to that unreal shore and find that book again. Was it real? Well, obviously it wasn't real-real. But was it something more than a product of her imagination? That beach had always been something special, a place created between Connie and Jade. It hadn't appeared to her since Jade had…

She tried to sleep, but couldn't. Something felt wrong, and it wasn't a new wrong. It was familiar, but more prominent now. Back at home, it had been a constant whisper among old comforts, a weight in her shoes that made her tired.

But the beach house was quieter than home. It was so, so quiet, with only the gentle sounds of the ocean. And because of that quiet, Connie finally understood what was wrong with her.

It was silence. Connie had silence inside of her.

For months, Connie had lived every moment of her life with someone else inside of her. Jade's voice had never touched her ears. It had lived in her mind. Even when the Gem had nothing to say, Jade's feelings, her every impulse, had pressed against Connie's awareness. Connie had been forced to make room inside of her mind for an entirely different person to share it.

Now that person was gone. Those thoughts and feelings that had seemed just like her own had vanished, and nothing had filled the empty space yet. Connie was half-hollow. She was alone. And in the quiescence of the beach house, that whisper, that weight in her shoes, now felt like a roar in her ears, like a slab of granite pressing down on her chest.

She suddenly became aware of dark eyes watching her from above. Turning her head, she saw a nest of curly hair disappear into a cocoon of blankets atop Steven's bed. A moment later, the hair emerged again, and the eyes returned through a gap in the blankets. "I wasn't staring. I promise!" Steven whispered.

A tiny smile broke through Connie's gloom. "Somebody forgot to tell that to your eyes," she teased in a soft voice.

Crinkles framed his eyes, belying a smile. Then they smoothed with concern. "Can't sleep?"

She shook her head. "It's…quiet," she admitted.

The blanket cocoon wriggled to the edge of the bed, peering down to Connie's cot below. "Since we're both awake, do you want to have a sleepover?"

Her smile widened, and a tiny laugh shook the slab pressing down on her. "I thought we already were," she said.

In answer, Steven crawled out of his cocoon. He rooted underneath his bed for a moment, and then slid off the edge of the loft to land on the couch just inches from the cot. A caterpillar-shaped sleeping bag fluttered behind him, landing draped over his head. "When I'm up there, we're in our rooms," he explained unseen, still fishing himself out from under the bag.

She could practically hear her father having a nervous breakdown at the idea of Connie sleeping within fifty feet of a boy, let alone fifty inches. "Obviously," she said.

"But if I'm down here, we can sleep together," Steven said, emerging from the bag. His eyes bugged, and he amended, "With each other. –next to each other!"

Connie tittered. The panic she imagined in her father seemed to be infectious. But it made the hollowness inside of her a little bit smaller. "That sounds great."

Steven wriggled into his bag, having emerged from his cocoon to become a caterpillar instead. His smiling face hung right in front of hers as he stretched out on the couch. "I've only ever had one sleepover before, and that was with the Gems. And we mostly just dreamed."

"it's my first one," Connie admitted. "Well, technically, Jade had one with Lapis, but I slept through it. What do we do besides sleep?"

"Ooh! How about we tell each other secrets? That's a sleepover classic. I'll go first!" He craned his neck, pushing his face forward until it was almost touching hers. "I'm really glad you're here," he whispered.

Her smile won the war, blossoming in full. "Was that a secret?" she asked.

His own smile turned sheepish as he pulled back onto the couch. "Not really. But I tell you pretty much everything already, so it's hard to think of anything." Then he settled into the cushions and waited expectantly for her turn.

Connie bit her lip, running through all the secrets tumbling around inside of her. _I don't know what to do now that Jade is gone. I feel bad for wanting to still carry her gemstone, but I feel guilty for wanting it gone. I don't want to disappoint you, or her, but I don't know what I can do that won't disappoint you both. Somehow, even though I've never felt emptier, I have so many stupid feelings inside of me that I think I'm going to explode and ruin the lovely home you were nice enough to open to me._

Any part of that jumble would have been enough to send Steven running. It made Connie want to run, and it was inside of her. So she carved off the smallest sliver of it that she could, and only gave him a tiny piece of that.

"I want to be a Crystal Gem."

Steven blinked at her, confused. "I thought you already were," he said.

She shook her head. "Not just as Pearl's student. Not just as a human with a sword. If whatever's happening to me doesn't stop, if it keeps growing, then I want to use it. I want to protect the Earth." A little extra piece of the sliver escaped, and without meaning to, she added, "It was Jade's planet."

Steven's deep, dark eyes watched her. She could see questions brimming in his stare. But all he said was, "It's your planet too."

"Yeah," Connie said, breaking her gaze from his. "Anyway, that's my only secret. Sorry. Kinda silly, huh?"

"Let's do it." His voice was pure, undiluted Steven: earnest and clear. His eyes glittered in the dark. "If you feel like you need something to make you more of a Crystal Gem than you already are, then let's find it, or do it, or make it. Starting tomorrow, we're on a mission to make you a Crystal Gem."

The slab on Connie's chest lifted another inch. Blinking hard, her eyes growing warm, she whispered, "Can I tell you another secret?"

"Yeah!" he exclaimed in a whisper.

"I'm really glad I'm here too."

His grin lit the dark room like a floodlight. "Okay, now that we got that out of the way, we can get to the serious sleepover topics. Like, who would win in a fight: a gigantic ice cream golem, or a mutated spicy pepper kaiju monster?"

Connie laughed. "Why would they fight?"

"They're fire and ice. They hurt each other. And there's no lukewarm third monster to help them reconcile their differences. A tragic misunderstanding that grew out of control."

"Peppers are spicy because of capsaicin," Connie pointed out. "They'd still be relatively the same as the ambient temperature of their battleground."

"That's a major advantage for the ice cream golem," Steven noted gravely.

They talked long into the night, trying to one-up each other with the most profound nothings their sleepy brains could muster. Connie found it easy to keep talking, even as she had to struggle to stop herself from saying what she really wanted him to hear. What really mattered was just hearing him talk. It didn't fill the hollow inside of her, but it made it ache less.

Sleep reclaimed Steven first. The pauses between his wild hypotheticals grew longer, until he finally nodded off. Connie let him slip away, content to let him rest. After the tumult of the day, she felt ready for the same. And perhaps if she could, she might find her way back to the beach in her dreams, where that book might wait for her again.

 _Tell the Crystal Gems that they need to be better. They won their rebellion, so I expect them to act accordingly as stewards of my planet._

They were some of Jade's final words, and they echoed in her mind. Connie could only imagine what the proud Homeworld soldier would have thought of Connie's "secret" to Steven. She would have cracked herself rather than move into the temple to become a Crystal Gem. But they were the only ones left to protect the Earth. And Flint, Milky, and Pyrite were still out there somewhere. Maybe given the extreme circumstances, Jade wouldn't hate her for it, as long as she saved the world.

Connie didn't get to be sorry, or feel sorry for herself. Not anymore. Jade had left her stone in Connie. And as long as Connie carried it for her, she would do what she could to protect the planet they both loved.

Moving silently, so as not to wake Steven, Connie crept from her nest and into the kitchen. The pad and pen they had used earlier still sat at the edge of the counter where Steven had left it. A litany of Gem powers and wind moves filled the page, as many as they'd been able to conceive of in an afternoon. Taking up the pen, she found room for two more lines, and squeezed them into the page in the tiniest letters she could manage.

 _Be a Crystal Gem_

 _Be a Jade_

She stared at the page, letting the new words scorch themselves into her thoughts.


	7. And Then

She rose with the dawn. The sound of gentle snoring rocked the giant caterpillar on the couch while she folded her blankets and collapsed the _All Cot Up_ to stow under the coffee table. Then she changed in the bathroom, practically leaping into a pair of shorts and an old sleeveless T-shirt of her father's, which she had to tie off at her waist. She wasn't sure who _The Herculoids_ were—some old band?—but they emblazoned her chest on her path to true Crystal Gemhood, a crest she hoped would prove worthy of the stone underneath it.

The sand was still cool as she hit the beach, following the shoreline at a jog. Reds and oranges were already fading into a clear blue horizon, and a handful of sailboats dotted the water, riding the same wispy breeze that stirred her hair. It was a far cry from the ocean and night sky of her dreams.

Try as she might, Connie hadn't been able to find her way back to that dream beach and the books lost in its ocean. The rest of her night had passed in a blur and ended with a tiny crick in her neck that four out of five drill sergeants would have approved. But she refused to let that slow her now. If she couldn't find success in her dreams, she could make it happen in the waking world.

Her legs felt stiff before she made it to the edge of Funland's fence. Lungs burning, she turned around and loped back for the house. She had to walk the last bit, rounding the cliff side with a stitch in her ribs. It was a good ache, and she savored the warm air rushing through her as she gulped for air.

When she let herself through the screen door, she found Steven already dressed and wiggling into his sandals. His smile was like a second sunrise waking Connie all over again when he saw her enter. "Good morning!" he sang. "Are you ready for the first day of your awesome journey to becoming a Crystal Gem-Gem? Are you ready for adventures, excitement, mystery and intrigue, and maybe a few musical numbers along the way?"

Suppressing a grin, Connie pressed a fist into her open palm and bowed. " _Hai_ , Sensei," she intoned gravely.

His smile dimmed. "Eh, I don't know if that fits," he admitted.

Both arms went to her sides, and she bowed more deeply. "Yes, Master," she answered.

Steven's smile collapsed entirely. "That just makes you sound like a genie," he said.

It became a real challenge to keep from smiling now, but Connie barely managed. "Of course, Milord," she said, and bent to one knee, lowering her head.

He waved his hands, exclaiming, "Definitely not!"

The giggles overtook her, and Connie rose back to her feet shaky with laughter. "Okay," she said. "How about Coach?"

Steven's eyes and mouth both went round as he gasped in realization. He rushed to his dresser, digging through his identical wardrobe for something different. When he came back, he wore a pink tank top and a red-white striped headband. A set of dark aviator sunglasses masked his eyes, and the whistle he had used in his camp counselor getup from the day before swung once more from its cord around his neck. "Now we're ready!" he said.

"Yeah!" cheered Connie.

"Let the adventure begin!" Steven cried, lifting his fists above his head.

"Yeah!" Connie shouted, leaping into the air with her own fists raised.

* * *

A dull avalanche of crunching noise rattled through Connie's head as she chewed. She hunched over her bowl, perched on a kitchen stool at the island counter, and stared down at the tiny brown cubes floating in milk.

On the stool next to her, Steven perused the back of a cereal box, reading between mouthfuls of drippy brown cubes he spooned out of his own bowl. He had offered to investigate the ingredient list for Connie after her careless glance at the box had booked the name of the cereal into her mind. "Nope. That's really the only ingredient," he said.

Her eyebrows rose in mild surprise, and she poked the cubes in her bowl with the tip of her spoon. Most cereals grew soggy after only a few minutes, or discolored the milk. This cereal did neither. "Really? No preservatives? Sugar? Salt? Monosodium glutamate?"

He checked again and shook his head. Turning the box around, he looked at the bold, plain text above the blandly drawn cartoon cereal bowl that was the logo. "It's just like the name says: _It's Bran_." Then he turned to the back of the box again and brightened momentarily. "Ooh, and there's a fun maze on the back you can… Nope. Solved it. It was just a straight line."

Connie sighed and watched her long breath stir the bits of _It's Bran_ into a lazy spin around the edge of her bowl. The sigh caught Steven's notice, and when she saw eyebrows raised high above his sunglasses in a questioning look, she said, "I know it's important to have a good breakfast, but I guess I imagined this going differently."

"Like how?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, shrugging. "Pushups, and yelling, and chugging raw eggs, and punching sides of meat. Stuff you see in boxing movies. But I guess it is kind of silly."

Steven contemplated his bowl of cereal. After a deep pause, he looked up and said, "I mean, we do have eggs…"

She met his gaze with a wide-eyed stare. Slowly, the same dangerous smile grew in both of their faces.

Less than two minutes later, each of them held a short, brimming glass. A half-empty carton of eggs sat open on the counter with broken shells littered around it. Three cheery yellow egg yolks bobbed as Connie lifted her glass to examine her new, more action-oriented breakfast. Her excitement dimmed a little when she saw Steven staring down his own glass with less enthusiasm. "You don't have to do this too," she told him.

Shaking his head, he looked up from the glass with a grin. "No way. I'm your Gem coach. If I'm with you on this adventure, I'm with you every step of the way." He raised his glass, and his grin broadened. "Now let's start this adventure for real!"

"Yeah!" Connie cheered. They clinked glasses and then chugged.

* * *

Connie strode out of the bathroom feeling weirdly refreshed. Her heart was still thumping in her ears, but her stomach felt more settled again. Mouthwash still tingled on her lips, masking not only the taste of the vomit, but also the memory of the disgusting raw eggs. She had never before felt so energized after puking out her guts, but it was working for her, so she went with the feeling.

Across the room, Steven was rinsing out the sink. Ever the gentleman, he had offered her the bathroom first, and puked into the sink instead. He turned off the rumbling garbage disposal and threw away his used paper towels. "Guess they leave this part out of those movie montages," he said, and burped.

"Maybe it's an acquired taste," Connie said.

"Now," Steven began again, lifting his fists overhead, "are you really, really, really ready to—"

Connie lifted her hands to stop him. "We should probably just get to it. If we keep starting the adventure, I might not have any time left to learn anything," she said.

"Good point," agreed Steven. He turned his aviators across the house, reflecting upon it in the wide, dark lenses. After a moment's thought, he fixed on the warp pad. Pointing, he declared, "Let's start there. Hop on!"

Connie rushed to the warp pad before he had even finished speaking. Warping was at the top of her Gem wish list, and she had been hoping to start there. Every Gem could warp, no matter their age or power or ability, so why couldn't she? Technically, she had done so already, back at Ascension, when…

She pushed the memory out of her mind, focusing on her excitement instead while Steven climbed onto the pad to stand next to her. Even though she knew it was her imagination, she felt the soles of her feet tingling at the tremendous power in the crystal beneath her. Using nothing but her will, she would propel herself thousands of miles, shooting herself through a slipstream of unearthly design. "Ready!" she said, and crouched, waiting for his instruction.

"Warping is easy," he told her. "It's about knowing where you want to go, and then sending yourself there. So picture where you want to go, and then, go!"

Connie frowned down at the crystal. The bluish material did not reveal anything new to her as she stared, but the imagined tingle in her feet did disappear. "Um, how do I 'go'? I know there's no activation phrase, or anything, and I never see you or the Gems make any kind of motion or pose. Is there something more technical you can give me?"

The question seemed to puzzle him, as though he hadn't considered it before deciding to teach her. He had thought about how to teach her, hadn't he? "Um… Oh! When I want to go somewhere, I focus on where I want to go, and then it…kind of happens. So why don't you think really hard about where you want to go?"

"Okay…" Connie drawled.

"How about the sky arena? You go there all the time with Pearl, so maybe it'll make your first warp easier."

She deepened her stance, trying to focus on the idea of the arena. The warp pad remained frustratingly dark underneath her. She tried again. Still nothing. Each time she tried to focus harder on the abstract idea of the place, piecing it together in her mind, the pieces seemed to grow fuzzier under a layer of frustration that kept growing thicker with each passing second she remained stuck on the pad.

Her lungs started to burn, and she realized she was holding her breath. She exhaled in a big _bwuff_ and leaned on her knees. "So, you can't warp anywhere you've never been before? You have to know where you're going?" she panted, using the question to catch her breath.

He shook his head. "I'm pretty sure I can't. But the Gems are always with me whenever I go somewhere new. And they've been around long enough to know all the warp spots on Earth."

Connie couldn't help but remember that the Crystal Gems hadn't known about Ascension, or any of the other locations on the newly connected Homeworld network Jade had given them. The memory put a layer of gloom over the layer of frustration, and now the imagined sky arena in her thoughts was entirely buried under the distractions. "I don't really know what I'm doing wrong, but it's definitely not working," Connie confessed.

Steven frowned for a moment, and then brightened. "Don't think about it. Try _feeling_ about it. You know?"

"Kinda?" Connie lied as she felt her face twist in confusion.

"Like, powers are all about feelings. So don't 'think' about the arena, just concentrate on how you feel when you're there," Steven instructed her. He motioned to his face, which stretched into exaggerated smiles and frowns so quickly that it looked like he was going insane. Then he finally settled on a smile, framing it with his hands, and said, "Feel the arena, and then grab those feelings and push them up inside of you."

Connie closed her eyes and crouched low, resting her fingertips on the cool surface of the pad. She tried conjuring the sensations of the arena—the crisp thinness of the air, the sight of clouds and landscape spread endlessly in all directions below the arena's edge—and used them as a backdrop for her excitement at learning the sword, her joy in her skills' development, her glowing joy in Pearl's approval.

Slowly but surely, the feelings she built up seemed to swirl together in the pit of her stomach. They rotated slowly at first, and then spun faster, mixing together into one sensation: the feeling she felt whenever she picked up a sword. As she concentrated, it spun faster and faster. "I think…I think it's working," she said, struggling to speak around the rising force.

"Good!" Steven cheered. "Grab on to those feelings. Lift them up. Use them to lift us both up to the arena!"

She practically vibrated with the force of the feeling now. Cold sweat dampened her forehead as she bent low, pressing her palms to the crystal, squeezing her eyes shut, as the feeling surged upward—

* * *

Connie staggered out of the bathroom, groaning as she wiped her mouth. The sound of the flushing chased after her, making her stomach twitch.

Apparently that refreshed feeling she had felt after the first round of vomiting had been a ruse to lull her into a sense of false security before the real puking started. Now it felt as though she had barfed half of her insides into the toilet, leaving her empty and sore and tired, even while her guts told her that round three could start anytime it wanted with no warning whatsoever.

Steven stood on tiptoe at the sink, wringing out the towel he had used to clean the other half of her insides off the warp pad. Looking over his shoulder, he called, "Feel better?"

She answered with a noncommittal burp.

Worry creased Steven's forehead. "Maybe we should take it easy for your first day," he said as he tossed the towel into the kitchen hamper under the sink. "We can slow down until you feel better."

A swell of panic nearly triggered that third round her stomach was threatening. "No!" she cried, and burped again. Clutching her middle, she scowled and swallowed hard, and then said, "No, I'm okay. Let's keep going. But let's move outside. I don't think I'm going to get warping today, and I don't want to mess up any floors again in case…"

He looked for a moment as though he would argue, but in the end Steven nodded and led the way outside. The sights and smells of the beach at morning were a good balm for Connie's stomach. She took a deep breath, letting the warm ocean air fill a little of the empty space in her.

Steven's aviators circled the sand, and then turned blue against the sky. "Hmm. Clear day. No local air traffic. Okay! Let's try the Gem Jump," he declared.

They moved to a clear section of beach. Steven hunched forward, spreading his arms and wriggling his sandals. His brows vanished behind reflective lenses as he set his features with concentration.

"You want to get a good stance going. Not too deep, or you'll lose power. Then, you just feel confident about it, and—"

He blurred into the sky, leaving a blast of sand where he had stood. Connie tried to follow the motion, but had to squint against the gritty spray, and then searched for him in the expansive sky. Seconds later she spotted a pink dot against the blue, and she ran a handful of yards to meet it as Steven floated gently back to the ground.

"Of course, none of the other Gems can fall as slowly as I can. Which sounds like a weird brag, but I'm owning it," Steven explained as he drifted the last few feet to the ground. "But the others seem to be able to land okay without crashing."

Connie grinned as she mimicked his crouch from a moment before. She knew jumping. What kid didn't? And plus or minus a floating power, Gem Jumping just seemed like regular jumping on overdrive. "Okay. Bent knees. Feeling confident. Aaand…"

She cleared a full twelve inches on her first try. It was a respectable height, but not the cloud-punching leap she had been wanting. Still, when she landed in the sand, she still had a big grin on her face to match Steven's. Neither of them expected her to get anything on her first try. It just felt good to be doing something at last.

The second failed jump couldn't diminish Connie's smile. Neither could the third failed jump. Or the fourth. Or the fortieth.

Jump number one hundred and thirty-seven, though, proved to be a smile-killer. The aching corners of her mouth dropped, and then the rest of her followed, collapsing into a heap on the sand. Her lungs were burning, and her legs felt like two numb rods of pain forcibly jammed up into her hips. By the final ten attempts, she wasn't even sure if her feet left the ground or not.

Steven rested a hand on her shoulder before she could try jumping straight from her knees. "Let's change it up. Maybe if you took a running jump instead?"

Connie waited at one end of the beach while Steven went to the other, giving her a chance to regain feeling in her legs. Using his toes, he dragged a long finish line in the sand, and then stood at the end of it. "Really go for it!" he called to Connie. Then he blew his whistle, and she lurched forward, sprinting at the line as hard as she could.

With each footfall pounding into the sand, Connie concentrated on the words of Douglas Adams, the foremost expert on unpowered human flight: _throw yourself at the ground and miss_ , she told herself.

With that galactic hitchhiker-tested certainty locked in her mind, Connie barreled up to the line and launched herself off of it with both feet, stretching her arms out before her as she left the beach. In the next glorious instant, she felt herself unshackled from the bonds of gravity, soaring free of the Earth with nothing to keep her aloft except her own sheer will.

The instant after that, gravity objected to her audacity by slamming her back into the ground, where she carved a short trench into the beach with her face. Her flying had been less Douglass Adams and more Buzz Lightyear: _falling with style_ , minus the style.

Steven tripped over himself to help her up, but she waved off his hand. The sunglasses did nothing to hide his guilty expression, which made her feel even worse for failing while she tried to suck the air back into her lungs. "Maybe it's a question of motivation?" he said. "Like, if you had something to jump over…"

As he trailed off, Connie saw a flash of pink reflecting in his aviators. She followed his gaze up to the porch, where a mountain of fur was sunning itself, its tufted peak rising and falling in slumber. Lion, too, was making the most of the summer morning, though with a different opinion about the amount of effort to put into it.

Her coach leapt into action, quite literally, clearing the porch in a single bound from where they stood. It was far less easy for him to convince Lion to abandon his nap, but eventually an armload of open tuna cans managed to coax the great cat down to the beach. Connie didn't mind the delay, because it gave her another chance to get the blood pumping in her legs again, and besides which, Steven's cajoling of Lion was practically its own cute little sitcom playing out just for her. She was happy to be the laugh track to their show.

After depositing the cans on the ground, Steven stepped clear, nearly bowled out of the way as Lion began emptying the little aluminum treasures of their fishy goodness. Wiping his hands clean on his pants, he pointed to Lion and said, "There. Now, when you run, try to jump over Lion. After all, you wouldn't want to hit this poor, beautiful, majestic king of the jungle, would you?" He patted Lion's flank, a tender gesture that went wholly ignored.

Connie backed up again, keeping her focus trained on the pink beast. She took a deep breath, thought confident, airy thoughts, and ran.

Lion let out a tiny _chuff_ noise when Connie slammed into his ribs. The blow didn't even jostle him or pause him from the last morsels stubbornly clinging to the rim of the tuna cans. But Connie felt jostled as she collapsed onto her back, watching stars spin in her vision against a big pink backdrop.

"…good effort?" Steven said, wincing.

Finished with his snack, Lion spared an irritated look at Steven before he sauntered back to the porch to resume his nap. Connie didn't even warrant such a look, but the cat's tail flicked her across the nose as he left, so she guessed he was equally displeased with her.

"Okay, that's my bad," said Steven. "I got it backwards. Anybody would try to hug Lion instead of hurdling him. What we need is something you want to get away from, something you can't stand so much that just seeing it will make you want to get as far away from—Oh! I know!"

Minutes later, Steven had wrestled a large cardboard box down the porch stairs and planted it at the jumping line. A layer of dust wafted off the box's open top, a sign of the box being long forgotten, but the logo on its side was unforgettable: it was a picture of a sculpted male bodybuilder flexing his arms across the breadth of the logo, dressed only in bicycle shorts and wearing a creepily realistic horse mask.

Steven grinned, turning his aviators between Connie and the hated box. "Eh? Right?" he said.

Connie stared at the enormous cardboard case of _¡Soy Delicioso!_ The all-vegan, gluten-free, carbon-neutral meal replacement system had once starved Connie half to death, and made her miserable with every single chalky, sticky, flavorlessly vile bar while it did so. Steven had freed it from its banishment behind the living room couch. She could feel its false horse eyes staring back at her, staring right into her very soul.

Bending low into a runner's starting stance, Connie glared back at the box, meeting its dead stare. "Let's do this," she uttered.

Feet pelting across the sand, Connie ran with everything she had left in her, never letting her eyes stray from the cardboard as her arms and legs pumped furiously. She didn't think about the jump to come, or even about the box itself. Instead she filled her mind with the memory of every awful bite she had ever eaten from that horrible brand's horrible product line. Every offense that stupid bar had ever made against every one of her senses filled her, and she pushed those feelings out into a frenzied battle cry as she reached the box and leapt.

She did not fly. She didn't even jump all that high.

But for one moment, Connie felt something. It was larger than she was, much larger. But more…ephemeral. It moved with her, around her, and against her. It rippled in her wake and parted for her as she pierced it. The new sensation made her gasp, and she felt it inside of her too.

Then she crashed into the cardboard box, tipping it over as she tumbled across the open top of it. A deluge of bars buried Connie as she hit the sand and dragged half the box's innards onto her.

Groaning, Connie sat up, letting the _¡Soy Delicioso!_ spill off of her. It pooled into her lap and surrounded her, crinkling under her palms as she braced herself on the ground. When she tried to reach for that strange sensation again, it was gone, lost amidst a headache that throbbed all the way down to her toes.

"Connie?" Steven said, approaching slowly.

Frustration proved to be a good anesthetic, keeping her too mad to care about how much her body hurt. Her stomach was still gurgling with the promise to send back anything she put in it, and the most disgusting "food" imaginable was all around her as if to dare her to try it. Her legs felt like tired fire, and the rest of her muscles were quickly catching up.

But a million times worse than all of that was having to admit to herself that she had expected this to be easier. Hadn't she already warped, and jump—flown!—before, back in the Battle of Ascension, when Jade—

"Connie!"

She looked up at Steven's alarm, expecting to see some unexpected danger. Instead, she got a mouthful of her own whipping hair. Only then did she realize that the wind was surging around the two of them in a mini-cyclone. Sand cut hard against her skin as the wind picked up speed, moving with enough force to scatter the meal bars in her lap. Hurriedly, Connie crushed her eyes shut and remembered the worst knock-knock joke her father had ever told her, looping it in her thoughts until the scraping winds around them settled back into a breeze.

Steven's gentle touch opened Connie's eyes. He helped her out of the mound of _¡Soy Delicioso!_ The sunglasses had been blown off of his face, and lay twisted some feet away, their lenses gone. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"'Orange' who?" Connie answered, still stuck in the joke loop. Then she shook her head clear and groaned, "I mean, sorry. I didn't mean to…"

"I get it," he said, and offered her a consoling smile. "I really, really do."

Of course he did. Steven as the only other person on the planet who would. And even though she wished that made her feel better, it didn't.

She sighed and started to gather the _¡Soy Delicioso!_ back into its box. "I guess we should clean up and then move on. My legs don't have any jumping left in them, but we can still try something else."

A soft, gentle guitar riff came in reply, making her freeze. The tinny music was coming from Steven's phone, which he held back in a jaunty stance while his other hand waited, outstretched. Connie melted as the riff blossomed into a familiar song, and she straightened, staring in wonder at Steven.

"I think we should try a Gem power we know you can already do," he told her.

Connie's face exploded into a grin, and she took Steven's hand in an instant. She yelped in delight as he pulled her off her feet, leaving behind all of her aches and frustrations as he swung her into a dizzying spin. Her body fell into step with his at once, and they became a living orbit that circled one another to the tempo of _their_ song.

The motion felt so natural, just as it always did with Steven, like her body knew what to do all on its own. It felt like a fire rekindled from embers, like waking refreshed from a thousand-year slumber to greet a bright new epoch. It was lightness and happiness made physical with each step of the familiar dance.

The thing that had made it dangerous for Stevonnie to exist was gone. Jade had taken the corruption with her into that empty sky. Where Jade had saved Connie, she had saved the fusion as well. And as keenly as Connie still felt the loss, she also felt grateful that she could be part of something, of someone, as wonderful as Stevonnie.

Sea, sand, and sky became a blur around them as Connie laughed and spun, keeping her eyes on Steven and his delighted features. A bright pink glow dawned from under his tank top, filling the air with rosy light. Feeling brighter and brighter, Connie held Steven's hands tightly in her own and let her self go, and the pink light engulfed them both, and then…


	8. Feel Right

Nothing.

The night Stevonnie had occurred, or transpired, or emerged—becoming something that words were ill-equipped to describe—Connie could remember a lot of confusion, not all of it her own. Merging into a singular experience made from the concurrent identity of two different individuals was something she could never have imagined, something that had literally never happened to another human. It had been intense, and bewildering, and an incredible rush.

Now, when all of that did not happen, Connie found herself just as bewildered in the opposite direction, unable to comprehend why she was still only a singular person instead of part of something so much more.

Her hands became clammy against Steven's, and she instantly felt a pressure as his eyes clouded with worry. Their laughter ended, and the pink glow between them vanished, making the sunny day dim once more. Connie's sweaty grasp slipped, and the two of them careened out of each other's orbit, landing apart on the sand.

For a moment she could only stare at Steven as she caught her breath and tried to parse out what hadn't happened. "Steven?" she said, packing all of her questions into his name.

"I…I don't know," he admitted. He lifted the hem of his tank top and craned his neck to examine his gemstone. "I'm so sorry! This has never happened to me before. Well, sort of, back when I was learning how. But I never thought it would happen with us! Maybe it was something we ate?"

The truth dragged Connie's gaze to the sand. She rubbed at her arm and said, "Steven, I think it's—"

His eyes bugged, and he cried, "No!" The volume of his voice startled them both, and he visibly forced himself calm as he dug into his pocket for his phone. "No, that's not it. We just need to try again. Maybe we just need different music. Come on!" When he held out his hand to her this time, his smile looked almost painful. "Let's dance."

They tried old moves that felt emptily familiar. They tried new moves that didn't fit them and felt uncomfortable. Up-tempo, slow dancing, tap dancing, which somehow put sand up her shorts and down her shoes at the same time. Jazz made no sense to her. Hula dancing was a little fun. But none of it worked.

The wellspring of music in Steven's library was far from exhausted, but he struggled to choose the next genre. "Okay, I don't usually break out the reggae, but maybe if we try jammin' a little—"

"Steven!" Connie cried. He jerked to a halt with his thumb poised over his phone, and the surprised hurt he wore on his features stung her. But she pushed through it to say the words they both needed to hear. "It isn't the music. The problem is us."

Eyes shimmering, Steven clutched his phone to his chest. "You and me?" he squeaked.

"No," Connie said. Her fingers wrapped into the _Herculoids_ logo over her chest to cup the shape beneath her neck. "Me and Jade."

"But Jade isn't…" Steven caught himself too late to swallow all of the words behind a grimace. He tried again, "My mom wasn't the reason I couldn't fuse with another Gem before. I just needed someone I felt connected to in a different way." A tiny, shy smile peered out from behind his worry.

"Jade isn't my mom. She didn't give me her stone the way you got yours," Connie argued. "She didn't really give it to me at all. It just stayed inside of me after she left." Her fingertips ached against the edges of the shape.

His mouth parted, but no reply emerged. The watery shimmer in his eyes deepened. "We'll figure it out. It'll just take more time than we thought."

She twitched when he tried to rest a comforting touch on her shoulder, making him recoil. Twisting away, she turned her head and mumbled, "I just need a minute, Steven. Gonna catch my breath, or whatever."

"…sure. I'll go get us something to drink." Everything about Steven screamed that he wanted to do exactly the opposite. Connie could hear it in his voice, in his breathing, even in the way he walked. "No eggs," he added, with a single coughing laugh following it.

Connie gritted her teeth and remained perfectly still until she heard the screen door close behind him. She hated making Steven feel bad. And she never expected to wake up and instantly become an expert on Gem powers, even though that would have been a nice surprise, and extremely convenient.

But not being able to fuse anymore? Not being a part of Stevonnie anymore after the possibility had come back so recently, out of the worst possible tragedy? That was one setback too many on this crummy, barf-y disappointment of a morning.

A rush of cold water swallowed her ankles, shocking her out of her melancholy. Without realizing it, she had wandered closer to the shore, her gaze drifting out toward the horizon without really seeing. The shock of soggy socks turned her wistfulness back into irritation, and she backed away from the surf.

Her foot snagged one a piece of buried garbage, and she planted onto her bottom just in time for another wave to come and swallow her up to her waist. Even on such a warm day, the ocean was cold, and it soaked through everything in an instant, making her squall at the sudden freeze that clung to every inch of her.

Anger and frustration exploded through the crumbling walls of her patience. "Oh, come on!" she snarled at the thing that had tripped her, a broken plastic shovel from some long-lost beach toy set. She kicked at the plastic nub in the sand, and at the wave rushing up behind it to soak her with its encore.

The air folded itself into a sharp crease starting at the sole of Connie's shoe. She could see the shape of the blast outlined in the sea spray as a wedge of air carved through the sand and split the wave in half. Water rolled up to either side of her while the offending plastic tumbled into the ocean, leaving a glittering contrail of sand behind it.

Connie stared at her own foot hovering in front of her. Another wave rolled up and soaked through her, but she didn't notice. She watched the foot plop into the water and then reappear as the wave receded. A few stray bubbles clung to the shoelace.

Furiously, Connie rolled onto her back and began kicking at the ocean. Her feet pumped, and she grunted in rhythm, putting everything her legs had into the effort. _Wind!_ she screamed in her head. _Wind! Wind! Wind!_ The word rattled her brain with each kick. But the only air she stirred was the frantic breath heaving in her chest. Her arms and legs collapsed, and she squeezed her eyes shut, letting a fresh wave roll over all of her. It hid the frustrated tears beading at the crease of her eyes.

Not having any powers would be okay. After all, she had lived without powers her entire life. Just like she had lived her entire life without a second person inside of her. But having those powers, having them because that person was gone, and not being able to control them… It was more than Connie could bear. She hated being a danger to the people around her. She hated knowing that she could do more, but not being able to.

 _And to what prodigious end would you employ my powers, human? Would you fly a kite? Spin a pinwheel? Dry that mass of keratin hanging off your scalp?_

It wasn't Jade. She knew that. But she couldn't help imagining the snarky Gem's sub-vocalizations as she lay in the surf. Jade would have choice words for her self-pitying. But she didn't. Because of Connie. And now all Connie could do was to clench her fist, knuckles sinking into the foamy sand under the sweep of another wave that swallowed her. She could feel her hand shaking with the force of her disappointment.

Shaking and…frothing?

As the wave receded again, Connie looked over at her fist and realized that she couldn't completely close her fingers. Something pressed back against her grip. It felt like a stress ball without the ball, or like gelatin that refused to squish. And when the water came back, it rippled away from her hand, bubbling and jumping as if at a boil, but without any heat. When she let go of her grip, and the boiling became a blast that sprayed her in the face.

Eyes wide, Connie scrambled to her feet and stared at her hands. Her fists opened and closed as fast as her fingers could move, but nothing more like that squishing sensation returned.

"Come on," she growled. "Come on!" She reached again for that feeling of disappointment, but her own excitement worked against her. So she tried imagining the disappointed voice again instead, conjuring it wholesale. _Wiggle your fingers, human. You look like a stage illusionist attempting a tutorial on TubeTube_ , her imagined Jade taunted her.

And like that, it came back. She felt resistance as she squeezed, and held onto the feeling. The very air in her hands rippled with pressure, making the sight of her fingers waver. And when she relaxed her grasp, the little crushes of air burst outward, kicking her palms down and knocking her back a step.

She had grabbed the air.

She had GRABBED the AIR!

Those months of living with a second set of emotions inside of her head had made Connie well-practiced in compartmentalizing her feelings. And now, half-hollow as she was, she had plenty of space in which to work. So she took that despair, that disappointment, frustration, and sadness, and she let it stew in the ache of the emptiness. Then she let the cocktail of feelings seep into her hands. And then she squeezed hard.

Strong pressure pushed back against the insides of her fists, to the point where her fingertips couldn't touch her palms. Little jets of air skittered out between her fingers as she shook with the effort. And when she let go again, twin bursts of air made her stagger backwards, throwing her hair behind her like a wet curtain.

For a moment, Connie could only stand there, staring at her wind-dry hands. Everything else about her still drizzled from the fresh, cold ocean soaked through her clothes. Slowly, a triumphant smile pushed up through her shock. She laughed.

She could squeeze the air. It was a far cry from summoning a hurricane, but it was a start.

But what was her limit? How hard could she actually squeeze? She clapped her hands together and trapped a bubble of misery between her palms. That misery coalesced into a ball of writhing, seething air that tried to force her arms apart. She gritted her teeth and hunched over, pressing inward with everything she had, and pouring every nasty thought she could muster into her fingers.

The rippling air grew, first into the size of a golf ball, then into the size of a baseball, and then, a basketball. It looked like a round mirage trembling under her fingertips.

Connie shrieked in delight. The noise came out of her, half a laugh and half a sob, and the breath of it joined her roiling ball, making it larger still. She was actually using a Gem power on purpose! She—

She lost her grip on the ball.

* * *

When Connie staggered through the house's door, she found the other Gems there with Steven, standing in quiet conference around the coffee table. Somber faces broke from the conversation to look at her. She met their stares with a wide, wild grin that didn't care how much her face hurt.

A flash of light swallowed Garnet's fists into her gauntlets. Pearl's eyes widened, and her stone flashed with the end of her spear, which she swept into her hands. "Connie! Are you alright? Were you attacked?" Pearl cried.

"Tell us who did this to you," Garnet said. A dangerous edge lay in the tenor of her voice.

Their fierceness caught Connie off-guard. She bit her lip in concern, and tasted copper. Surprised, she touched her lips and saw her fingertips come back red. Her nose was throbbing from the accidental explosion she had set off between her hands, but she hadn't realized it was bleeding, too. "Oh, right. It looks worse than it hurts," she told them.

"That's a relief," said Amethyst. She still lounged on the couch, seemingly unconcerned with the rough state of Connie. "It looks like somebody tried to eat you and gave up halfway through."

Connie craned her neck to look at the rest of herself. Soaked from head to toe, crusty with sand, with raw scrapes on her knees and elbows, and a bloody nose painting her chin red, Connie had to admit she was a fright. IF she had walked into her own house looking like this, her mother would have already called an ambulance. Thankfully, adrenaline and excitement made for a swell anesthetic.

"Connie," Steven began, "we should—"

"Okay, yeah, but Steven: look!" Connie brushed past his concerned look and stood between the Gems. Squatting low, she cupped her hands before her. This time she grabbed at a much smaller patch of air, and a deep breath through her nose gave her a blossoming pain that helped channel her frustrations into the creation of a new rippling mass of air pressure.

"Whoa!" Amethyst jumped from the couch and stuck her face next to the ripple in Connie's grasp. "That's so cool! It's like some kind of anime power, or something. Can you make your hair blond and spiky too?"

Steven pulled Amethyst back before the purple Gem could stick her nose into the ripple. But he too crouched down to examine Connie's new discovery. "You're really doing it," he whispered, his breath tickling her knuckles.

Carefully, Connie drew the ball back and then eased her shaking palms apart, letting the pressure dissipate as she let out a sigh. "It's still really hard to do, and even harder to control. Earlier I kind of knocked myself silly on accident," she said, and pointed to her swollen nose. "But I'm okay now."

Amethyst grinned and bopped Connie on the shoulder. "You're more than okay. You're awesome! What do you call those little ripple-doodles? Air bombs? Air grenades? Gren-air-ds? No, that last one only really works on the page."

"Well done," Garnet said, rewarding Connie with a slight tilt of the head.

"Well done, indeed!" sang Pearl, clasping her hands together. Then she caught a meaningful look from Steven, and her excitement shrank. "Erm, but we do still have something to discuss. Steven, I believe you wanted to start?"

The concerned expression on Steven deflated Connie's smile. She swiped at her face with the back of her fist, but only managed to spread the sticky feeling across her face in a streak she could see Steven's eyes follow. "It's great that you figured out your air-ball-thing," he said, and offered her a grimace that was probably meant to be a smile.

"…but?" Connie prompted him.

"But," he admitted, "I'm really worried about you. You're pushing yourself too hard."

Protest welled inside of her, threatening to spill into a new windcident, but she tamped it down before it could escape. "I've already learned so much. And it's not even lunchtime yet!" she argued.

Steven opened his mouth to retort, but closed it when Pearl rested a hand on his shoulder. The pale Gem's face went stony, and she snapped, "Connie: Form Three. Go."

Connie's body took over for her sluggish mind, pushing her through the movements of Pearl's training form. Repetition had imprinted the dance-like pattern into Connie's limbs, and thanks to the previous sword ban by her mother, she was accustomed to practicing with an empty hand instead of a sword. But after three moves, Connie's legs wobbled, and no amount of muscle memory could keep her from collapsing onto the floor.

As Connie winced and hissed, Pearl helped her to her feet again. "You were performing that sequence flawlessly by your third week," Pearl reminded her. "Of course, you were a bit dryer the last time you tried it."

"Okay, yeah," Connie grunted, ducking her head to hide her embarrassment. "But—"

Steven stepped forward and caught her in a hug, pressing close as he wrapped his arms around her shoulders. "You have time," he told her, his voice low but firm. "You have all the time you need. I know it doesn't feel like it, but it's true."

Closing her eyes, Connie rested her chin in the crook of his neck, letting herself sag into his embrace because it felt nice, but also because she was exhausted, and standing had become a lot more work as her adrenaline high faded. "You've never been in school, Steven. Summer never lasts as long as you want it to."

"It'll last longer than you do at this rate," Garnet noted.

"I'm not telling you to stop," Steven promised her. She could feel him grin, knew the shape of that smile as his cheek pressed to hers. "Just…ease up on yourself. After all, I found some of my powers just by hanging out with you. It might work both ways, don't you think?"

Her tired arms rose and circled him. "Using a hug is cheating," she mumbled into his shoulder.

She felt his smile widen against her cheek. "I'm just using everything I've got to be the best coach I can be. Speaking of which…"

Steven licked his fingertips and pressed them gently into her neck. A tingling warmth flooded her body, creating ecstasy out of the sheer absence of pain and cold that his healing powers banished. Awash in the tingle, Connie couldn't help but think how much easier it would have been for him to kiss her cheek instead. Then the warmth doubled, and she was certain it wasn't from the healing magic.

"And, you know, practice wasn't the biggest thing that helped me find my powers anyway. It was spending time with these guys," Steven continued as he stepped back and gestured to the other Gems. "We've been talking about it, and we all agreed that you need some one-on-one time with everybody."

The warmth receded from all but Connie's cheeks. "That's really kind of you. I know how important your patrols are with those other Gems still out there."

"This is important too," Garnet told her.

Amethyst winked. "We'll get that rock in you working in no time."

"And of course, we'll continue your other training. It'll help keep you sharp," Pearl added, and also tried to wink, which came across more like a failed attempt at blinking. Then she frowned and asked, "Was that okay? I don't do puns very often. It didn't feel right."

Steven gestured up toward the loft, producing the television remote from his back pocket. "Right now, your coach is assigning you some important new drills: there's a marathon of _Under the Knife_ this afternoon, and I don't want to see you try anything else until you give me five episodes. Er, after you get cleaned up," he added, and watched Pearl produce a fluffy white towel from the glow of her gemstone.

Connie accepted the towel from Pearl, and offered them all a wan smile before she made for the bathroom to make herself livable again. She knew they were worried about her, just like her parents had been worried about her. They were probably right to worry, and she loved them all for it.

But as she clenched her hand, feeling the ripple of air pressure building against her palm underneath the drape of the towel, she reveled in the new truth of that day. What had manifested this new breakthrough wasn't Steven's coaching, or any amount of practice or wishing. It had been Connie plunging herself into misery and frustration. Those feelings were fueling the ripple of air gathered in her hands.

Those feelings were what Jade's gemstone demanded. Whether it was penance for failing to save Jade, or punishment for being the human who had ended Jade, Connie couldn't know. But she knew what the stone demanded now. And she had the empty space where Jade had been inside of her to hide those feelings away from the others, so they wouldn't worry.

She smiled, and buried those feelings away where no one could see them, where they would fuel Jade's gemstone.


	9. Captain Nemo

Never before had Connie felt so reluctant to shoot through the glowing tunnel of a warp pad. Such trips had once been the highlight of her week, such as when Pearl or Steven would warp her up to the Sky Arena. But today, she would rather have been doing anything but. Even gym class would have been a better alternative. Gym class didn't make her stomach churn with dread. Mostly. As much.

She and Steven appeared in their destination and were rushed by the smell of pollen and soil. The world around them stood lush with greenery, a field of tall stalks topped with soft yellow tassels. Next to the field stood its boxy fortress, where scrap metal had been bolted over old red paint and cracked wood to turn a barn into a stalwart haven. A gentle breeze stirred past her cheek on its way to the field, where it rippled through the corn, turning the crop into a waving ocean of gold.

It was only after her sneakers crunched onto the barnyard that Connie remembered the scores and scores of land mines that lay buried throughout the farm. She winced with her whole body, waiting to see if she exploded. Moments later, when she didn't, she sagged in relief.

"Steven! Connie Jade!" Peridot called to them from the mouth of the barn fortress. The little green engineer scampered across the yard with the kind of fearlessness Connie did not normally associate with people who lived on top of minefields. Behind the Gem trundled a rusty garbage can riding atop a set of caterpillar treads that framed the bottom of its canister.

"Hey, Peridot!" called Steven, jumping off the pad with his own landmine-scoffing courage. "This place looks great! Are those new rivets around the doors?"

The Gem whirled back toward the barn and cupped her hands to her mouth. "Ha! I told you somebody would notice, Lapis! And barely off the pad, too!"

Connie followed the direction of Peridot's gloating up to the corner of the barn roof. There, she saw Lapis sitting at the edge, her head and shoulders hunched over an open book in her lap. Even from this distance Connie could see the Gem's eyes rolling at Peridot. But then that blue gaze fell upon Connie and froze. Without a word, Lapis snapped out her wings and dropped from the roof, loop-de-looping through the door to the barn's loft.

It was exactly the reaction Connie had expected, and feared, and probably deserved, and it made her stomach churn harder. The feeling steeped her, draining slowly into her half-hollow.

"Ha! She's speechless with her own wrongness," Peridot crowed. When she glanced back and saw Connie eyeballing the ground beneath them, she waved off the wordless concern. "Oh, don't worry. We got tired of being so careful with where we walked—and un-glooping the Campers whenever they glitched off a safe path." She slapped the side of her garbage can affectionately. "So now all the farm's defenses are on standby. I retrofitted them with transmitters so I can prime them remotely from my command center!"

She pointed to the amalgamation of scrap built at the edge of the field. It featured a satellite dish made of old pie tins, and a mechanical typewriter jammed into its side beneath a cluster of old CRT televisions that served as monitors. Connie was forced to admit that, compared to most of Peridot's other inventions, it did appear somewhat commanding. "How did you network the mines? Did you have to build all those transmitters from scratch?" asked Connie.

Peridot's grin widened. "No, that's the best part! I opened a bunch of new accounts with some terrestrial communication provider, and they supplied me with one new communicator for each instance! Now I have hundreds! Show them, Nikki."

She gestured to the garbage can, who obediently tilted forward and disgorged an avalanche of smart phones from under its lid. The black screens piled up between its treads into a small, expensive mountain of technology.

A look of concern bounced between Connie and Steven. "Peridot, did you pay for all of these?" Steven asked.

Snorting, Peridot scoffed, "Of course! You think I don't understand your planet's primitive economics? Your barter-by-proxy use of fungible chits is utter simplicity to a Gem as advanced as I!"

"I think some of that meant 'yes,'" Steven said, sounding uncertain. "So, great! But where did you get all that money? My dad?"

"No, he put all project funding on hiatus after the setback of Camp Crystal Gem," admitted Peridot. "But no matter! I found an unlisted data page on the human network that serves as a repository for credit codes. I should forward you the network address. This _Anarchist's Piggybank_ has a wealth of information I previously assumed to be confidential!"

Steven blanched as he pivoted to Connie, and his cheery tone pitched an octave higher into panic. "Okay, so that sounds like credit card fraud and identity theft. Which, now that we know about it, makes us…?"

"Accessories after the fact." Connie's voice emerged as barely a squeak. She was paralyzed with horror at the prospect of being made a criminal. Her dreams of holding public office were over before they had ever begun, because surely no criminal could get herself elected. Then again, her father did mutter about crooks in office whenever he watched the evening news. But she would have to learn how to cover up a dark, sordid, illicit past now that she accidentally had one.

The moral conundrum must have been obvious on her face, because Steven's hand slipped into hers and gave it a squeeze, becoming the anchor that kept her from spiraling away. "Let's put a pin in that. Maybe forever. And hope it never comes up again," said Steven. "Peridot, when you need money, ask me, and I'll ask my dad. No more web numbers."

The engineer rolled her eyes. "Much more cumbersome, but fine. So, did you only come here to curtail my progress?"

Steven kept his hand in Connie's, and she let him draw her along as Peridot led them toward the armored barn. "Actually, we thought maybe you could help out with a problem Connie's been having. We're in Gem training, but looking for something a little more, ah, low-impact for today."

Connie's pride wanted her to argue again, but the ache in her hamstrings told her to keep quiet.

Peridot's eyes rolled further still. "Of course. Stars forbid you visit because you want to see us."

His features crumpled. "Oh, I'm sorry, Peridot! Of course we want to see you! Do you want to hang out—"

"That's sweet of you, Steven, but I'm far too busy," Peridot interrupted, puffing with self-importance. "However, I'm always happy to assist with Connie Jade's transition into demi-Gemhood. What seems to be the problem?"

"It's—" Steven began, but then yelped as his sandaled toes banged into something shiny and oblong just inside the barn doors. The object skittered to a halt in front of them, revealing itself to be a segmented, swiveling joint capped by a pointy boot. It looked almost like the leg of some medieval suit of armor crafted from a bunch of inside-out coffee cans that had been welded together.

As Steven hopped, Peridot gestured at the curio. Her ferrokinesis carried it back to the workbench from where it must have fallen. "Pardon the mess. I tend to get disorganized during the alpha stage of my more exciting projects. It stimulates creativity. You were saying?"

A glance told Connie that Steven, watery-eyed, was still beyond speech. "It's my booking. My reading powers? Everything I read, or see on TV, or on any kind of screen, it ends up burned into my brain."

"That's wonderful progress!" exclaimed Peridot.

"No," Connie insisted, "it isn't. I keep memorizing billboards and commercials and websites. Do you know what the top Gaggle search results for 'hyperthymesia' are? Because I do, and I will forever."

"Hmm. I hadn't considered the sheer amount of nonsense information this planet generates. But there are solutions we can explore." Peridot drew Connie away from Steven to stand by the workbench. With a few light touches, the Gem directed her patient to stand upright with her arms lowered and her chin lifted. "Let's start simple. Close your eyes."

Connie complied.

"Good. Now, place your palms tightly over your ears," she heard Peridot say.

Frowning, she cupped her hands to the sides of her head. The ambient noises of the farm disappeared, replaced with the thrum of her own pulse echoing in her hands.

"Can you discern anything, Connie Jade?" Peridot asked loudly.

"Not really," Connie answered, also loud as she spoke to hear herself.

"Success!" crowed Peridot. "Whenever you don't want to catalogue something, just do that!"

Connie's eyes opened into a scowl as she dropped her hands. "I can't live with my eyes closed and my fingers in my ears!"

"It was just an early attempt. We'll refine our methods," Peridot assured her, lifting her hands in a calming gesture. The Gem's gaze wandered about the room for a moment, and then brightened. "Aha! Follow me!" She scampered to the ladder at the back of the barn and climbed.

Glancing at Steven, Connie saw him with weight back on his injured foot and a semi-encouraging smile on his face. Unconvinced, she followed anyway, climbing into the barn's loft.

The loft was almost as spartan as the rest of the refitted barn, though cozier. It now played home to all of the creature comforts that Lapis and Peridot enjoyed. An old patchwork couch and a new-ish television took up most of the space, but a little bookcase had been added to the corner, with paperbacks and manga and hardcovers stacked haphazardly on its shelves. A beanbag chair was piled next to the bookcase, and a splash of bright blue was sprawled across the beanbag with a pumpkin in her lap and a book propped over the gourd.

As Connie's eyes broke above the edge of the loft, she saw Lapis reeling back at the sight of her. The Gem fell backwards out of the beanbag with an _eep_ , and Pumpkin catapulted out of her skirt. Before Connie's hands even touched the loft floor, Lapis was out the window in a blur of wings, absconding with her book and leaving poor Pumpkin spinning on the floor, yelping in confused alarm.

Connie grimaced at the hasty exit, but tried to pretend like she hadn't noticed as Steven hobbled up the ladder after her. Lapis avoiding her meant that Connie got a stay of unpleasantness. That would be a problem for later. Or never. Better never, if they could keep up this avoidance.

Then Peridot caught their attention again. The Gem had stuffed her entire upper half into the cushions of the couch, her legs wiggling in the air as she hunted for something. A muffled triumphant cry emerged through the upholstery, and then Peridot emerged holding her prize above her head. "Behold, the tool by which Connie Jade shall master this facet of her new self!"

"Oh, hey," said Steven, "it's the old hand-me-down tablet I got from my dad that I hand-me-down'd to you!"

Peridot cradled the glossy, thin screen with a surprising amount of reverence. "Correct. And now I'm hand-me-down-ing it to Connie Jade. I've crafted a particular application into this device with the express purpose of data recall. I just never imagined anyone else would have such a use for it." She thumbed one of the glowing app icons on the screen before passing the device to Connie.

When Connie rotated the screen, she found video files arrayed in tidy rows. As quickly as her eyes could focus, she memorized the name of every file onscreen. Each name started with a production number and finished with a corny title like "Where The Red Pine Grows" or "Canoe Please Not Right Now?"

"Wait a minute. Is this a show?" Connie said.

Peridot vibrated with excitement. "It's the complete series of _Camp Pining Hearts_! I obtained this version from a different unlisted network address—which I will also share, you're welcome—so the subtitles are burned into each episode with multiple human dialects. The translation context makes for a slightly different experience, but it's still an acceptable means by which to consume the show."

"And this will help me control my booking, how?" drawled Connie.

Another deft green touch opened the first file on the pad in Connie's hands. Immediately, a bootlegged video player app launched, and with a few more swipes by Peridot, the screen began to flash with fast-motion images of vintage Canadian teenagers. Though soundless, the episode was accompanied by a stack of three different subtitles, only one of which Connie could understand. In less than thirty seconds, Connie had forever absorbed the pilot episode of _Camp Pining Hearts_ , minus the bits she had missed whenever she blinked.

Peridot waited until after the credits were done before she said, "Take the pad with you, and watch a number of episodes each day. Rewatch them when you're done and see if you experience anything different. Try to control when or how you absorb what you watch. With practice, and using something familiar, you should be able to adapt your use of 'booking' to be active when and where you choose. Oh!" Peridot straightened, becoming grave as she added, "This part's really important: report back to me which pairing you believe is the most optimal. But be careful, because if you don't say Pierre and Percy, you'll be objectively wrong."

Connie stared hard at the grim little Gem. Her eyes narrowed, and she said, "I feel like this is just your way of getting me to binge your favorite show."

"It can be two things!" Peridot insisted shrilly. Then she looked down, scuffing her foot against the floor as she demurred, "I mean, I suppose the exact media is irrelevant to you practice, if for some reason you object to watching the best show ever, using an experience I curated expressly for the purpose of sharing the show with the people whose opinions I value the most…"

Sufficiently guilted, Connie heaved a sigh and tucked the pad under her arm. "Sure. I can watch a couple of episodes every day, especially if I can get through them so qui—"

"Huzzah!" Peridot cheered, leaping with her fists pumped above her bushy hair. Then she hurriedly regained her composure, coughing into her fist. "That is to say: excellent. I've no doubt that this exercise will prove beneficial to your training."

"I actually read some stories the other day that paired Gwen and David," Steven piped up. "They were pretty good."

"Those two new counselors they added to the show in its final season? Preposterous." A look of scorn filled Peridot's visor. "I've tracked down every iota of media released by Maple Poutine Ltd., the studio that produced the show, and the tie-in material, and even the serialized adventures printed on the boxes of those licensed _CPH_ -brand prepackaged whittling sticks that ended up bankrupting them. There's nothing at all officially released to suggest that Gwen and David are together."

"Oh, not officially. It was just some fan fiction I found," Steven explained.

"Fan fiction?" Peridot echoed, her mouth clumsy around the unfamiliar words.

"Sure. Stories that fans write," he said. "Sometimes they continue the story, or branch off into alternate timelines or settings. A lot of them plug the characters into high school. Those are fun!"

A cloud of cell phones appeared from all directions to swarm Steven, held aloft in the invisible grip of ferrokinesis guided by wide, manic green eyes. The little bricks of technology emerged from tool boxes, cabinets, from atop workbenches, out of overturned crates, and even from between the cushions of the same couch that had produced the tablet. They all streaked through the air and began to orbit Steven, trapping him behind a piecemeal black mirror.

Then the screens parted to allow Peridot through. One by one, they lit with different websites, bathing Steven in a harsh glow that made him flinch as Peridot's voice emerged from behind the light in a low, deadly rasp. "Show me," she demanded. "Show me everything. Now."

Connie backed slowly away as the cloud of phones closed around the pair. She caught a glimpse of Steven's eyes pleading for help, but even Connie's heroic impulses had their limits. One such limit, it turned out, came before a deluge of amateur literature obsessed with the imaginary love lives of fictional characters in a Canadian teen dramedy. She mouthed _I'm sorry_ to him, and then crept back down the ladder.

The guilty satisfaction she felt at her escape lasted only until she stepped out of the barn and back into the sunlight, and immediately came face to face with Lapis. The blue Gem lounged at the edge of their deep water pit, her feet submerged, her book open in her lap. Her fingers hung in mid-turn of a page as she stared back at Connie, motionless and looking silently terrified.

This exact moment had been Connie's dread for weeks, and exactly why she had been so anxious about visiting the farm. She hadn't seen or heard from Lapis since the Battle of Ascension. She hadn't been there when Lapis had to find out what had happened to Jade. And though she knew she should have, Connie had never asked after the Gem or how she had handled her friend's…absence.

At first Connie's grief had given her an excuse. When that had gone on for too long, Connie took to imagining that Lapis would want space and distance to process the loss. And by the time that was no longer plausible, an uncomfortable amount of time had passed, too much time for Connie to feel like she could explain away. She wasn't sure what the right thing might be to say to Lapis, but she was sure that _nothing_ was the worst thing she could have come up with, and that's what she had done: nothing.

Lapis and Jade had been close, or as close as a former Homeworld prisoner could be to a former Homeworld solider. Connie had just been the human stuck between them, rarely a help in bringing them together, more often a meddler, a third wheel, and an unwilling jailer. She could only imagine what Jade had told of her to the other Gem in their chats and emails.

Now Jade was gone, and it was Connie's fault. How was Connie supposed to face Lapis after that? What could she say after so long a silence? _Sorry your friend vanished so her human prison got to live. Wanna catch the new Dogcopter movie next month?_

She wouldn't blame Lapis for hating her. She just couldn't stand the idea of seeing that hate up close.

"H-Hi, Lapis," Connie stammered, and tried to smile.

Her voice jolted Lapis out of her stupor. The Gem yelped, and the book jounced out of her hands. She bobbled it once, twice, and lost it over the middle of the pool. Connie's heart leapt at the thought of the book, any book, being dunked and sunk. But a seemingly solid hand made of water reached out of the pool's surface and caught the book by the spine, snapping it closed and handing it back to Lapis before a single drop could sully its pages. Only a harmless glimmering of dew remained on the faux leather cover.

"Hi, um, Connie," Lapis said, curling her legs up out of the pool and under her skirt.

As her bibliophile's terror faded, Connie recognized the book Lapis was holding. It was one of Connie's own, after all. "Oh! That's _Twenty Thousand Leagues_ , isn't it?" she said.

"Yeah," Lapis said, hiding behind her bangs as she studied the book in her lap.

Connie hadn't missed the book when she had read her entire house the week before. But searching her memory now, she couldn't feel that particular volume inside of her. "Second time?" she echoed.

"It's confusing, but I like it," said Lapis. A smile tugged at her lips, and her eyes went faraway with a look Connie knew too well. Rereading a book, getting lost in a familiar story, was one of the best feelings in the world. "I like Captain Nemo. He's free to go anywhere, and he's good to his friends, and he lives underwater. But he's so angry at so many people, and I'm not completely sure why."

That much Connie remembered without the text already living in her brain. "A lot of it's historical. Verne was drawing from England and its…" She watched the Gem's brows knit in confusion, and tried again. "Um, Nemo was angry at a country…a bunch of humans who were trying to control everyone. They were kind of like Earth's own Diamonds. And when he meets any of those humans, or anybody like them, he goes kind of crazy, and, well, a lot of people end up underwater. Which is bad, what with the breathing."

Realization trickled into Lapis' features. "Oh, I get it! Nemo was basically his own kind of Crystal Gem! Wow, I don't know if that makes me like him less or more." She scoffed, but then her eyes flicked back to Connie, and her smirk faded. "Anyway, I guess you want it back now, since, well…"

"Oh." Connie winced, and her eyes prickled. But she held out her hand and forced herself to smile. "Sure. Thanks for taking such good care of it."

She wanted to say so much more, but didn't. Lapis had been betrayed by Homeworld, and Jasper, and even the Crystal Gems. She had spent ages trapped just like Jade, except without any kind of Connie to advocate for her. Trust didn't come easy to Lapis, and if the Gem didn't feel ready for more connections—or, more likely, if she just didn't want to be friends with the dumb human tagalong that had gotten stuck in the middle of her real friendship with Jade—then Connie could understand. She just wished that understanding made her feel better about it.

Lapis started to hand the book over, but then pulled back, hesitating. "Look, can I just say…? Ugh, I suck at this," Lapis groaned, and bit her lip. She trembled, rumbled, and then finally exploded, "I'm sorry you don't want to be friends! There. I said it." And she thrust the book out dejectedly.

Connie couldn't lift her hand, and left the book hanging. Her mouth opened several times before she finally managed to say, "Buh-wha?"

Shoulders sagging, Lapis groaned, "After the time we spent together trying to help Jade, I thought maybe I had made another friend. But then, after Jade was gone, and you didn't visit or screen-mail thing me, I…" Her hand trembled around the book until she hugged it to her chest. "I get it, you know? I'm just some other Gem that Steven knows. I'm not even one of the Crystal Gems, like Peridot is. I just wish—"

"I still want to be friends!"

The words burst out of Connie, knocking Lapis back a step and forcing the Gem onto the pond, where she bobbed gently as her soles rode the ripple of the water. "R-Really?" Lapis squeaked.

Connie still fumbled around the thoughts colliding in her head. "You want to be my friend?" she said.

"Of course!" Lapis exclaimed. "You're so nice! You worked so hard to help Jade when she was stuck in you. And you understand Gem stuff and human stuff, like with that Captain Nemo thing. Peridot had no idea what I was talking about when I tried to tell her. Steven has trouble explaining Earth stuff to me sometimes, even, but you? And…

Eyes cast down into the waters beneath her, Lapis dropped her voice to a murmur. "And you're not afraid of me. Sometimes Steven's friends, and the humans we know, they all look at me like I'm a disaster waiting to happen. Which, yeah, I kind of am, since I was before. Steven and Peridot don't treat me like that, and when you didn't either… It meant a lot to me."

Connie stepped to the edge of the pond. "But I thought you hated me! You should hate me. I'm the reason Jade isn't here anymore," Connie said, choking at the last.

"But I thought Jade gave up her physical form. Didn't she?" Lapis said, confused. When Connie nodded, Lapis shook her head. "Even with Jade living inside of you, you couldn't do that for her. Jade did that. It would be like if I breathed or ate food for you. Right?" She chuckled a little at her own musing.

Connie couldn't help but chuckle too. "Maybe I don't understand all Gem stuff as much as I should. But can we still be friends?"

Lapis' smile became genuine, and a little sad. "I would like that. I think I need all the friends I can find."

"Me too." Connie matched the smile with one of her own.

Brightening, Lapis asked, "Do you have one of those screen-mails like Jade had? We could write to each other! I like doing that. It lets me think about what I want to say before I say it. Oh, hang on! Peridot gave me a bunch of those little devices. She said I could use screen-mail on them. I'll go get an extra one so you have something to write me with!"

Before Connie could protest that she already had a smartphone, and a laptop, the blue Gem was airborne and darting into the barn's loft. A wave of warm relief spread through Connie's middle as she grinned up at the departing Gem.

That relief lasted only as long as it took for Peridot's shrill voice to reach her from the barn doors. "Connie Jade! Connie Jade!" the little engineer called as she emerged. "Steven and I need you to settle an argument. Or rather, I need you to agree with me. There is no way that an American comedy web series remake loosely based off the unaired pilot of a failed _Camp Pining Hearts_ spinoff counts as canon. Even if _Camp Camp_ and _CPH_ characters have a couple of the same names—"

"You don't have to call me that anymore, you know."

Connie hadn't meant to say it out loud. She didn't realize that she had spoken until she saw Peridot stop dead in her tracks. "What?" said the engineer.

"You don't have to call me 'Connie Jade' anymore," Connie muttered. "After all, Jade is…gone."

"WHAT?" Peridot's shriek made Connie spin around. She staggered as the little Gem leapt onto her, planting a foothold at either side of Connie's hips and grasping the collar of her T-shirt. The motion stretched the fabric halfway down Connie's chest, exposing the green stone and a flash of white bralette underneath.

"Get off!" Connie slapped Peridot off of her, as much out of surprise as anger. As she gathered her shirt collar in her fist, her face burned with embarrassment. If Steven had been there to see, Connie might have died, though only after killing Peridot first.

But in spite of the unknown near brush with death, Peridot looked relieved from where she lay in the dirt. "Oh, thank the stars. You're still all there," she sighed, and pointed to the gemstone peering out through the stretched collar.

As Connie tried to rearrange her shirt back into decency, she growled, "Of course the stone is still there, you maniac! But Jade isn't in it anymore!"

Worry lines filled Peridot's visor above her large, sad eyes. Rising up, she dusted off her legs and said, "Jade isn't gone."

Those words punched Connie right in the pit of her stomach. "…what?"

"Yes, the memories and experiences formerly inhabiting your gemstone are no longer present. A second personality no longer cohabitates your singular form. That so much knowledge, so much history, is lost to us is a tragedy," Peridot admitted, her chin falling to her chest. Then, with a deep breath, she looked back up and explained, "But the things that made her special are all there, encoded into the stone. Her tenacity, her brilliance, her indomitable will, everything that shaped the individual she became, are all now a part of the individual who still remains. That's you."

Connie felt her eyes prickling again. Her hand drifted from her collar down to the square shape at her throat. "I… Wow. Thanks, Peridot."

For a moment, her half-hollow didn't feel quite so empty.

"It's likely the confusion of your human half, since that's the remaining personality component," Peridot mused. She chuckled, and added, "Luckily, that won't last much longer. Since your cognizance is based around human and Gem physiology now, those traits from the stone will only grow more prominent as your identity adjusts to its new circumstances. Why, you may already be as far removed from your former humanity as Steven is from his Rose Quartz mother!"

And just like that, the moment ended, and Connie felt a million new little fears, and questions, and worries, and existential terrors, all rushing in to be swallowed into the half-hollow.

"…thanks, Peridot," Connie muttered.

"You're welcome, Connie Jade!"


	10. Your Weapon

Cold steel in her hands. A light sweat beading at her brow just beneath the line of her tightly braided hair. Fog surrounding her to hide her opponents. Her heart racing with the thrill of battle.

For one brief, beautiful moment, Connie's messy life had become simple and clean: win or fall. Nothing else mattered.

The sound of footsteps taunted her from the thick of the fog. She thought for a second to close her eyes and let her ears guide her, fighting blind like so many of her favorite fictional warriors would have, but many old bruises and lumps had already taught her to know better. Heroes on the page didn't need to worry about taking a real sword through their fictional guts. Her senses worked better together.

One set of footsteps changed direction and speed, moving at her from behind. Air whistled around the edge of a swinging blade, the sensation of it somehow clearer to Connie than the sound of it. Then the fog burst apart as one of her foes attacked, already swinging a long, thin saber as it emerged from the whorling curtain.

She tamped down on another storybook impulse. Blocking a sword with another sword looked cool in movies, but it chipped or broke blades in real life, especially when the other sword was being wielded by a super-strong alien. Even if the sword didn't break, her noodle-y human arms might crumple under the force of such a blow. Of course, she used to have a sword that could take the abuse. The blade of Rose Quartz: unbreakable, unstoppable, and abandoned by Connie in the Battle of Ascension when—

Connie pushed the thought into her half-hollow. The best way to avoid a sword was to get out of the way. The tricky part came in how close the sword got, and where her feet ended up after it missed.

Ducking, she spun under the oncoming blade. The rush of splitting air coming off her opponent's steel seemed to cry out at her, but she ignored it, and spun her own saber to answer the swing. Where she went low, her opponent went high, flipping over the swipe as though gravity was merely optional to the creature.

The fog broke again as her second attacker tried for her back before Connie's feet could settle. A twin to her other foe, this new attacker swung downward to split Connie down the middle. But Connie had expected the opportunistic strike and kept her body and sword spinning, making the new foe think twice. When Connie stopped her turn, she stood with eyes open, sword raised, and her identical enemies both now revealed and in front of her.

Fighting two opponents didn't scare Connie like it might once have. As they tried to flank her again, she strafed, keeping one behind the other relative to her. The right footwork turned a two-on-one battle into two one-on-one battles, one after the other, and with both opponents fighting to get out of each other's way. If the strategy flustered her opponents, it never showed in their blank faces. Even still, Connie smiled.

Emboldened or impatient, the forward opponent rushed Connie, and its twin charged shortly behind. One swung high, the other, low, working to box Connie in or force her retreat. But Connie was feeling bold and impatient, and rushed to meet the blades.

A heartbeat before being skewered, Connie launched herself through the air like a missile, slipping through the gap between the foes' blades. Her body corkscrewed, and her blade flashed as she passed between the pair. The tip of Connie's braid skipped off the flat of the high attack with a soft _tonk_ as she passed unharmed. Her blade rocked with two impacts.

She landed in a roll, the flagstone hard and cold against her shoulder. Her blade snapped to attention as she tumbled back to her feet, facing the way she had come, ready for a counteroffensive. But the fight was already over, evident in the bright red gash that bisected each twin where her blade had swept through them.

In staggered unison, the Holo-Pearls jerked upright. Their translucent forms ballooned as each one announced, "Defeat: Accepted!" Then they popped, becoming a dwindling blue cloud that dissolved into the mists around them.

A burst of applause lit the fog. "Brava! Well done!" Pearl's words of praise preceded her as she emerged through the gray curtain. The pale Gem swept her hands apart, and the curtain parted, dissipating to reveal the Sky Arena around them. Beyond the white flagstones and the levitating rubble, a crisp blue sky stretched for miles, with a carpet of lush greenery even farther below. "Two opponents at Level Three? Outstanding!"

Warmth filled Connie's cheeks as she grinned. "Thank you, ma'am," she said, and bowed. "Were you able to see the fight through the fog?"

"Well, no," admitted Pearl. "But that's certainly the fastest you've gotten through a low-visibility exercise. You're progressing even faster than you were when we started."

A sliver of guilt pressed into Connie's pride. She knew the sudden leap in her progress came mostly from her new booking ability. Being able to remember every one of Pearl's instructions perfectly, simultaneously, without even trying, was almost like cheating. But it meant she always knew where to put her blade and her feet, making her balance better than it had ever been.

She stuffed the guilt into her half-hollow where it belonged. The undiluted praise made her practically vibrate with excitement. "What's next, ma'am?" she said, bouncing lightly on her toes.

Pearl started to answer, but then paused. She fell into a long silence that eroded the smile out of Connie. As curiosity began to tie knots of anxiety in Connie's chest, her mentor finally said, "Let's sit down for a break."

Those knots in her chest tangled together as Connie followed Pearl to the amphitheater seating of the Arena. A little equipment box tucked behind one of the rows yielded two bottles of water, which were kept perfectly chilled thanks to the altitude. Connie accepted one bottle, twisting off its cap and relishing the relief it spilled through her parched lips. But the anxiety kept knotting tighter and tighter in her chest as she waited for Pearl to speak.

"I've felt we should talk for some time now," Pearl admitted. She stared down at her hands, her thumb worrying at the edge of the water bottle's label. "I kept putting it off, and then your training sessions become much less frequent for a time…"

Of course, Pearl was tiptoeing around the full truth of why those session were so infrequent, because Connie was fragile, and hurting, and could explode into tears if anyone so much as hinted at anything having to do with Jade.

Connie stuffed the ugly little thought into her half-hollow and fought to keep its lingering presence out of her voice. "You kind of sound like you're building up to something bad, ma'am. Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

The question jolted Pearl out of her fidgeting. She smiled, and insisted, "On the contrary! You've progressed faster and farther than I could have imagined when we began. It took me a decade to become as confident with a sword as you are now." Her smile dimmed, and her eyes drifted into her lap. "The truth is, I've run out of fundamentals to teach you."

The knots in Connie's chest wrapped around her heart, seizing it as she whispered, "Does this mean I'm a sword master now?" Her eyes widened at the thought.

But Pearl's laughter dashed the thought immediately. "Oh, goodness, no!" tittered Pearl. "There's always room to improve your basic form, and your speed, and stamina, and precision. You've still only just begun."

"Oh." Now Connie was the one fidgeting with her water bottle, her eyes downcast.

Seeing the effect of her words, Pearl stifled her laugh and said quickly, "What I mean is, this is where the real work begins. Now you have to use your training as a foundation to build your own style of fighting."

Connie's gaze snapped up again, her miffed feelings forgotten. "Really?" she breathed.

In spite of knowing better, she couldn't help but thrill at the idea of joining the likes of the Lonely Blade, or Roronoa Zoro, or any of a dozen other fictitious sword masters from her bookshelf who were renowned for their signature style. Of course she couldn't be a master yet, because real masters forged their own path instead of simply excelling in drills and practice.

Her smile warmed as Pearl nodded in agreement. "I think you're ready to start deciding what kind of fighter you'll become. Understand, this will be much harder than your training up to this point," she said, growing serious with her warning. Even still, a hint of a smile remained through the guise.

Connie's brow crinkled. "Why did you sound nervous about telling me this?" she asked.

"I was uncertain," Pearl admitted, and was quick to add, "not of you, but of me. After all, you're my first student. I tried teaching Steven once before, but he lost interest after he saw me being stabbed."

"I can see how that would be discouraging," Connie said, and cringed.

"I want to give you the help you need. And going forward, I might not always know what that is," Pearl confessed. "It's a bit daunting."

Connie felt some of that uncertainty as she watched Pearl fiddling with the bottle label again. It wasn't often that she saw this more vulnerable side of her mentor. Pearl was an immortal warrior, a veteran of an impossible war from before the dawn of human civilization. How could anything she did for Connie matter so much in her endless life? Yet here was Pearl, fretting all the same.

"Have you ever felt like this when it comes to helping Steven with his Gem stuff?" Connie asked.

Pearl scoffed. "Of course not. I've always known that with enough time and love, Steven's development would happen in due time. You're his best friend, so surely you already knew that. You tell each other everything."

Connie's expression went sly. "Nothing here gets back to him. What happens in the Arena stays in the Arena," she promised, and raised a hand to seal her solemn pledge.

Sagging, Pearl threw back her head and groaned. "I was in a constant state of terror that I would say or do something to destroy his future! It seemed like there was some new calamity popping up every eleven minutes to turn our lives into pure chaos! Thank the stars Greg had him for his pre-talking era. It was already confusing enough not understanding what he needed when he could tell us himself!"

Connie tried and failed to hide her laugh. "But you got through it," she noted.

"Barely, but yes," Pearl agreed. "We just did our best and hoped it would work out."

Hesitating only a second, Connie rested a hand on Pearl's arm, drawing the Gem out of her fretful recollections. "And it did work out. Just like it will work out with me."

She had no idea if her words were true, but she so badly wanted to believe them. And seeing the smile returning to Pearl's features convinced Connie that it had been the right thing to say nonetheless. But the Gem's smile didn't last long.

"There is another issue, if we're going to start developing your style. How we proceed will depend on your weapon of choice. And, well…"

And Connie had trained with the sword of Rose Quartz. The blade that had carved a whole planet from the Diamonds' grasp. The blade Connie had abandoned—

She stuffed the thought into her half-hollow, making room for more useful notions once it was buried. "What about a Gem weapon? Could I summon one? Do I have one?" she asked.

Pearl tapped the water bottle to her chin in thought, leaving a thin beard of condensation beneath her lip as she did. "Every Gem is created with whatever she needs to fulfill her intended purpose," Pearl explained. "If Steven is any indicator, you'll have whatever Jade had."

Nodding, Connie felt her lips twisting, as if torn between a smile or a grimace. There was nothing wrong with her inheriting Jade's sailcloth, although the thought of trying to fly with the kind of control she had demonstrated over her winds made her stomach drop. And it still didn't solve the issue of her needing a new weapon. "I guess I can't change what Jade was made with," she said, and sighed.

"That isn't necessarily true," Pearl said, surprising her. "It's a part of you. A part of your purpose. So, if you can change your purpose—which is very, very, very difficult for a Gem—then that part of you can change as well. But it's an incredibly rare feat. Only one Gem we know of has ever managed it." At this last piece, Pearl's chin lifted in an unmistakable look of pride.

Her excitement revivified, Connie said, "But it can be changed."

Smirking, Pearl leapt from her seat to the Arena floor, the motion all fluid, effortless grace. One hand tossed the bottle she had been fiddling with, sending it tumbling above her. The other hand touched her glowing gemstone and came back with a spear. The weapon flashed as she spun it in a lazy defensive pattern that still moved faster than anything Connie had ever managed. Then, with a vicious cry, Pearl stabbed forward into empty air. The water bottle dropped from its high arc and landed neatly on the flat of the spearhead.

"No Pearl would ever be made with a weapon in her," Pearl boasted, and waggled her spear. The water inside the bottle sloshed, but the bottle stayed on its perch. "For years I fought using only material weapons. It's how I mastered the sword. But after a long, long time, I found that my desire to protect the one I…the ones I loved," Pearl said, correcting herself quickly, "had given me my spear."

Connie could practically feel the stone at her throat tingling with excitement as she rose to her feet. "What was it before?" she asked.

Embarrassment shone blue in Pearl's cheeks. She snapped her spear back to her side, her hand flicking out as an afterthought to catch the water bottle. "It was a staff. Rather an ornate thing. I was supposed to wave it around when I made proclamations for my…for the 'important' Gems," she admitted, rolling her eyes.

The thought of a bunch of fancy Gems losing their minds over an armed Pearl made Connie giggle. She leapt down to join the Gem, though it took her two or three jumps to equal Pearl's one. "I think I'm hydrated enough to continue, ma'am. Unless you wanted to finish your water first?"

The teasing question made Pearl look twice at the bottle in her hand, as though she hadn't realized what she was holding in the first place. "Oh! No," she said, and flashed the bottle into her gemstone. "Now, since you'll be taking a more active part in how we train, we may as well start now. What would you like to work on?"

Connie's hand tightened on the grip of her training saber. With her head clear, her whistle wetted, and her guilt safely tucked into her half-hollow, it was easier for her to remember that she was only half the reason for the loss of Rose's sword. The other half had batted her around with ease, laughing at her powerlessness and at the corruption that had twisted her body beyond recognition.

"May we do more emulation training, ma'am?" The rough approximation of other Gems that Pearl could create through her doppelgangers weren't completely true to the originals, but they were close enough for Connie's mood.

"Ooh!" Pearl hummed in approval, and poised herself to create a fresh hologram. "Who should our victim be? A Ruby? A Citrine? Another Flint, perhaps?"

"A Pyrite," Connie said. Her heart sank a little as she watched Pearl drop the poise for uncertainty. "Is that okay? Or can you not do a Pyrite?"

"No," Pearl said, and then quickly after, "Well, yes. I didn't see much of the Pyrite that attacked us. But based on what I did see, and what you, Steven, and Garnet told us, she isn't anything like the Pyrites I've seen."

"What do you mean?" asked Connie.

Pearl opted to show her. With a flourish, the graceful Gem produced a blue double of herself, and then commanded it, "Holo-Pearl, emulation: Pyrite."

The transformation was over before Connie could blink. Unlike with other emulations, this Holo-Pearl's frame didn't really expand to suggest a greater strength, keeping instead its lithe build. Delicate fingers gripped the haft of a spear that had been warped to include a single, curved axe head. Pointed hair extended down to the shoulders in a simple bob. A haughty expression filled the hologram's features as it announced, "I glitter for the good of the Authority!"

With a shrug, Pearl gestured to the emulation and said, "They used to be much more common, I think, but they fell out of fashion long before the war. The last time I was on Homeworld, the few that were left were used as honor guard, standing next to doors and looking pretty." Her mouth twisted around that last description.

Appraising the Pyrite, née Pearl, Connie could see the twisted logic behind the soldier's graceful build. Hulking Quartzes like Jasper and Milky must have been meant to correct the arrogance of prizing form over function. Of course, that attitude had given them Rose Quartz, so maybe the lesson should have been _don't be despotic jerks_.

Her grip fixed around the hilt of her saber, and Connie bared her teeth in a wild grin. "Looks aren't everything," she declared, and nodded her readiness to Pearl.

The Gem grinned in kind and leapt clear of the Arena floor. Then the fight began.

A blur of motion rushed at Connie, coalescing into the arc of an axe swing meant to take her head. Just because a Pyrite wasn't impressive by Gem standards, it still outmatched any human in strength and speed. But Connie had known since the first time she had touched a sword that every fight ahead would be unfair. She had trained knowing it, and wasn't afraid of it. As soon as she saw movement she was backing away, circling and keeping her blade raised to the emulation, giving her the distance and time she needed to find her opening.

Distance, it turned out, was no issue for the Holo-Pearl. Its axe had enough reach to keep after Connie. Though its swings were blunt, lacking any real elegance, it was enough to keep Connie on the defensive. Twice she had to slap away the axe's shaft or else end up with its blade in her teeth. That kind of reach wasn't easy to counter unless she could find a way inside the weapon's arc.

Connie's mind raced while her hands and feet moved on reflex to keep the fight at a stalemate. She knew there were several ways to skirt the axe and get at its wielder. But winning the fight wasn't the only challenge in front of her anymore. She needed to forge her own path as a warrior, and that started with choosing a weapon. She wanted it to be her weapon, the weapon she might pull from Jade's gemstone, but that meant finding it first. Only Jade could summon the tool meant for her. Since she was gone, that left it up to Connie to be Jade in her stead.

Loosing one hand from her saber, Connie tried to grab the air and push it into the hologram. Jade could summon a gale that would have blasted her foe to the horizon. When Connie tried it, she felt her fingers push through a thick soup of air, as though she were trying to shove a wall of cold tapioca. Barely a puff emerged from her palm to ruffle the hologram's bob of hair.

The effort exhausted Connie, and almost cost her the match. Only a frantic backpedaling saved her from the axe head as it buried into the flagstone in front of her. She raised her sword, found her balance again, and thought anew. Clearly her gusts weren't up to the task. She cursed herself for trying something new in the middle of a fight. _Stupid. Reckless. Foolish._

With a growl, she took those thoughts and stuffed them into her half-hollow.

Then she blinked, almost forgetting to duck the next axe blow. Her half-hollow had been made when Jade left. It was everything absent about the Gem, and it was hungry for the negativity Connie had been feeding it. She had spent the last week trying to fill it with all of the garbage feelings that seemed to make her new wind powers work at all. One power in particular she knew already worked, and almost always when she wanted it to.

She didn't have to wait long for the right moment. The Holo-Pearl swung like a thresher, quickly and powerfully but in a predictable motion. Just as the next swing passed, Connie reached out, not with her hand, but with her half-hollow. It felt strange, as though she were trying to move a limb she had lost, and her concentration faltered. So she gritted her teeth and screamed silently into the half-hollow, _Do it, human!_

The air in front of her foe collapsed into a shimmering blur the size of Connie's fist, and the sudden inversion dragged the hologram face-first into the shimmer. Connie could feel the half-hollow strain against the tension, threatening to tear apart, and she realized she had overreached. She couldn't hold that much pressure all at once. So she didn't.

As her half-hollow released, Connie watched the shimmer explode into an invisible blast. The hologram was flung backwards across the Arena. Its axe spun and clattered to rest far, far out of reach, hardly stopping before it dissipated into its constituent motes.

Connie could only imagine what her face looked like as her lips peeled back at the hologram shambling to its feet. Her half-hollow stretched unseen across the Arena, straining farther than Connie thought possible, and gathered another air grenade beneath the dull emulation.

 _Worthless human!_ Connie snarled into herself.

This second burst was larger than the first, and it threw the hologram over the Arena's edge. The misshapen Holo-Pearl slammed into the floating pieces of a column and then tumbled, vanishing down toward the earth below.

Gasping, Connie collapsed to her knees. Her saber dropped next to her as she sucked in greedy lungfuls of air. Every muscle in her ached, but with the satisfied kind of pain that came from pushing through a workout. Her half-hollow felt empty again instead of teeming with all of the things she had been trying to hide in it.

A long shadow fell across her. She looked up and saw Pearl waiting with an uncertain expression. Offering Connie a hand, Pearl said, "Er, that was quite impressive. Well done. What exactly was that?"

Connie accepted the hand as she tried to reassure Pearl with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I think that was the first piece of my style," she said.

 _That's how a Jade fights,_ she added silently. And her half-hollow ached in agreement.


	11. Lesson One

Her hands followed the path burned into her memory. Creases and folds became wings that spread out from a squat, angular body. A little tuck made the beak, and then her latest creation was ready to join the rest of the flock on the porch railing.

"Not a flock," Connie mumbled to herself as her booking inundated her under a mountain of facts. She nudged the paper crane into line with the others, lengthening the row she had spent the better part of the morning in making. "It's a dance, a sedge, or a siege, or a swoop. Or, I guess, a construction," she said, and chuckled as she poked the little origami piece.

Steven had left earlier in the morning to help his father at the car wash. More than likely that help would become the two of them noodling on guitars while they waited for a customer, and Connie was glad. Her own fleeting homesickness made her feel guilty about how much time Steven was spending with her already. He deserved time with his father.

But as soon as Steven had left, a quiet miasma had filled the house with his absence. Connie hadn't lasted fifteen minutes before she had fled to the porch to escape the feeling of being an intruder in someone else's home. After a full week at the house, she still felt like a visitor, and without Steven or any of the Gems around, she felt like an intruder.

No, not like an intruder. She felt like an extra piece found in the wrong puzzle box, something that only fit with the rest of the puzzle if it was pounded into place, and even then it didn't match the rest of the picture.

She tried shaking the feeling, tried stuffing it into her half-hollow until the emptiness was fit to burst. Still, it persisted. So she decided to try and take her mind off of things with the packet of origami paper her parents had packed for her with her summer gear. It had only taken seconds for her to learn a dozen new origami patterns, and the crane was supposed to be a token of luck, assuming she could fold enough of them. So the railing was packed wingtip to wingtip with the birds. Yet her half-hollow was still full, and her fingers were sore, and her luck felt just as crummy as it ever had.

Growling in frustration, Connie pushed her hand out at the row of birds. Her air grenades were easier to make now, but she knew they were child's play compared with all of the things Jade could do with her wind powers. Connie would have to find that same kind of strength and precision if she ever wanted to measure up to who Jade had been.

 _Stupid human!_ Connie snarled inside her head as she thrust her hand forward.

The paper crane meant for her gale blast continued to sit, heedless of her effort.

Over and over, Connie threw her hands forward as if to push the air, yelling invectives in the privacy of her own thoughts. _Stupid! Useless! Worthless!_ But her paper flock remained where it was, and the morning air remained as still as ever. The only air she managed to move was the puffing of her heavy breath as she leaned on her knees, giving up.

"What does it take to make you guys fly?" Connie wheezed at her paper crane lineup.

"Have you tried bread?" one of the cranes answered her.

Connie shrieked, tumbling backwards from the railing, and the talking origami cackled and slapped its wing on the rail. This particular crane was purple, which wasn't so odd coming from a multi-colored packet of paper. But it also had a large purple gemstone tucked under its body, mostly out of sight unless someone knew to look for it.

"Amethyst?" Connie croaked, dragging herself up out of her own tangled limbs. "How long have you been there?"

"A while, I think? You were totally zoned out, and I wanted to watch without interrupting. I like your little dudes," the transformed Gem said. Her little paper beak wiggled as she spoke, and her eyes blinked from the front of the crane's body. The wings crinkled as she flapped and said, "Quack! Quack! Gimme bread!"

Stomach clenching, Connie felt an old shyness sprouting back up from where she'd tried to bury it. She had thought she was alone at the house, which felt weird enough, but not being alone and not realizing it felt so much weirder. "Um, it's just something I'm trying to help me relax," she stammered, gesturing to her efforts on the rail. "There are fables about warriors who meditated while folding a thousand paper cranes, and they were granted their heart's desire. …not that I think that'll actually happen. I just thought it sounded cool."

She cringed, wishing she could suck the words back into her mouth. Origami fables? Amethyst would think she was a child!

"Wish birds? Cool," Amethyst said. The Gem flashed, melting her body off the rail in a rush of white light that coalesced back into her usual stocky shape. She plucked her former neighbor up and inspected him closely, tilting the crane until it pecked her on the nose. "In that case, maybe don't wind-zonk them, or you'll have to start over again. That's what you were doing before, right? With all that flailing?"

Cringing harder, Connie tried to fling them out of this conversational cul-de-sac, blurting, "Did you need something?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah!" Amethyst tossed the bird as if she were releasing a magician's dove to a crowd, ignoring the way it nosed into the deck when she turned away. "Today's my day to chill with you! So, what did you want to do?"

Connie jolted. She had been so preoccupied with thinking about developing her own fighting style, and harnessing her wind powers, and learning how to utilize her half-hollow, that she had completely forgotten about her day with Amethyst. Had she been tasked with thinking of something to do with the other Gems? Pearl had always kept her own meticulous lesson plans, and it had never occurred to Connie to think the other Gems might be different.

"We could go surfing, or catch some sun. Maybe go explore some old Gem junk?" suggested Amethyst.

But of course the other Gems would be different! Garnet was a taciturn mystery, and Amethyst was like some immortal rowdy professional wrestler-slash-standup comedian. A careful decision had been waiting for Connie, and she'd been too preoccupied to realize it, and now she was wasting Amethyst's valuable time when the Gem had already agreed to spend time with Connie even though she had no good reason to even want such a thing!

"Ooh! You know what I've always wanted to try? Pole-vaulting!" Amethyst shapeshifted her thumb and pinkie, sending both far in opposite directions of her hand until they formed a long, flexible rod, which she hefted, letting the ends wobble. "It's like, you could just get a ladder, but instead you throw yourselves over some stick just to see if you can? How crazy is that!" she laughed.

Breaking free of her whirlpool of thoughts, Connie pointed to the Gem's hand and exclaimed, "That! Let's do that!"

Amethyst threw her arms in the air, lifting the finger-pole high. "Finally! Pearl would never let me do it with Steven, but I totally think we can make the roof if we—"

"No, no," Connie clarified, and pointed at Amethyst's transformed hand. "That. I want you to teach me how to shapeshift." Shapeshifting was one of the powers she had barely experienced even secondhand, and had no idea of how to start since she and Steven had added it to her list. If Pearl the sword master could teach Connie the blade, it made sense to think that Amethyst, a master of her own shape the way most humans had mastered breathing, could teach her something about shapeshifting.

With only a brief pause, Amethyst grinned and shook her hand back into its proper shape. "Sure, we can do that. It'll be fun! Now, watch close, because I'm going to give you everything you need to—"

"Wait!" Connie shrieked, and now Amethyst tumbled back in surprise. "Sorry, sorry! I just… One second!" Connie rushed into the beach house, dove into her footlocker, and came back as quickly as possible with a pad and pencil, which she held poised to take down every word of Amethyst's.

Amethyst eyed the notepad skeptically, but stood and dusted herself off without comment. "Okay. There are really only two steps you need to know to shapeshift. First step: take your shape." She held her hand out for Connie to examine.

Connie's pen clawed at the pad, taking down everything. She even added a tiny sketch of Amethyst's hand in case she needed to refer to it later, labeling it _Figure 1-A_ in anticipation of any number of future drawings.

"Step two? Shift that steez!" Amethyst flicked her wrist. Her hand flashed into the shape of a delicate, perfect paper crane seated on the stump where the hand had been. Its beak wiggled, and Amethyst lifted it to _boop_ Connie on the nose. "Bawk-bawk!" she squawked.

Her arms fell limp as Connie stared. "Is…Is that it?" she asked. "There isn't, like, a mindset, or a thought-sequence, or muscle contractions, or projecting technique you use to become something? You just do it?"

"That's it," Amethyst agreed, and flapped the wings of her finger-crane. "Think about what you want to be, picture it in your head, and let your body flow. Give it a shot!"

A weary, frustrated thought rose to Connie's lips, but she swallowed it hard into her half-hollow instead. The year before, at Steven's birthday celebration, he had shapeshifted himself to be taller, and broader, and more distinguished. That particular memory made her cheeks glow, and she tucked those feelings safely outside of the half-hollow to unpack later, focusing instead on the objective particulars. If Steven could make his limbs grow, then presumably, Connie could as well.

Squatting into a deep stance, Connie held her arms out before her, staring at the knuckles of her clenched fists. "Shape…shift!" she commanded, willing her fists to extend beyond her wrists.

The fists remained exactly where they were.

"Shift!" she demanded. "Shift!"

Amethyst rested a hand on her shoulder, pulling her up out of her stance. "Whoa, easy there, tiger. You can't force it. You gotta relax into it."

Connie made another attempt, seeking to noodle her arms into being longer through sheer floppiness, and trying as hard as she could to keep relaxed. She relaxed as hard as she possibly could, her molars grinding in her cheeks, chest clenched to keep her breathing smooth and deep, eyes watering as she squinted to see past all her troubles to a calmer, newer, shapeshifted self.

Sighing, Amethyst gently pinned Connie's arms to her sides. "You look like you're pooping and having a seizure at the same time. Remember what the meerkat and warthog said? Kahuna Potato! If you don't get it now, it'll come to you later."

Another swell of frustration rose in Connie. She stuffed most of it into her half-hollow, letting just a little emerge as a sigh. "I'm sorry," she said, stepping out of Amethyst's arms. "It's just, I'm used to learning things differently. At school, or in music, or with Pearl, there's always a technique to learn, or facts to memorize. There's something tangible I can work on. This is different, and I don't think I'm gonna be very good at it. But I have to be, because—"

 _Because I have Jade's gemstone, and I don't deserve it, and I shouldn't be here, and—_

"—it's important for me to work hard and make the most of my time here, especially if you're all being so nice and taking the time to teach me this stuff." Connie bit her lip, her guts clenching as she realized how big of a word salad she had just dumped into the Gem's lap. "Ugh. And now I'm just making it awkward. I'm sorry," she apologized again.

The obvious worry began to fade from Amethyst's features, and they curled instead into something more cunning. The stocky Quartz tapped her finger to her chin as she considered Connie for an excruciatingly long and silent moment. Just when Connie thought she would explode into another apology, Amethyst said, "Congratulations. You just passed my secret test."

Connie blinked. "Um, what?"

"I had to be sure you were serious about this stuff. Shifting your shape isn't for beginners, rookie. Don't you remember what happened to Baby Steven back at the farm?" Amethyst set her brow at a stern angle. She plucked one of Connie's paper cranes off the rail and held it in her outstretched palm. "He wasn't ready for the real deal, the true techniques of shapeshifting. But I think you might be. As long as you understand how deep you're about to go."

This was more seriousness than Connie had ever seen coming from the Quartz. Connie kept expecting a punchline, or a _gotcha_ laugh. But Amethyst had fixed her with a stony look that would not be broken.

"If you lose your shape, you lose yourself." Amethyst's fingers closed, and the crane crumpled into a ball that rolled to the deck as she tilted her fist. "You have to do exactly what I say. This will be the toughest lesson you've ever had, a million times tougher and more awesome than anything Pearl's taught you up until now. Are you ready to—"

"Yes!" Connie cried. Then she clapped her hands over her mouth. "Sorry. Please, go ahead."

"…begin?" Amethyst finished solemnly.

Connie nodded deeply. Her whole body tingled with anticipation, as though it were ready to rearrange itself if only she could phrase the whim correctly. "Yes," she said, this time in a hush.

"Then hold onto you butt, rookie. It's about to get moist," Amethyst growled.

"Right," Connie said, nodding again, and then paused. "Wait. What?"

* * *

Gentle waves rolled beneath her, soaking the hem of Connie's shorts where she stood just off the beach. The water pulled goosebumps up her legs and turned the light breeze frigid against her wet skin. She kept her feet planted against the pull of the tide and tried not to shiver as she awaited further instruction.

Standing waist-deep behind Connie, Amethyst turned her back to the ocean, staring back at the temple carved into the face of the cliff. The Gem's features were as inscrutable as those of her home. She held out her hands, letting each wave rise up to meet her fingertips.

"Lesson One: it's all about water," Amethyst said. After a long beat of silence, she continued, "Questions."

"So, so many!" Connie said excitedly. "To start, why did you insist I put on socks and shoes for this? I was wearing my sandals before." She lifted one foot out of the surf to watch a stream of water drizzle out from the tongue of her sneaker.

"No, you interrupted me," Amethyst scolded her. "What I meant was, questions: you won't need them, so don't ask them. In fact, never question anything I tell you to do. That's Lesson One. Now where was I? Oh, yeah, water. Water reflects the essence of shapeshifting. Look at the water. Feel the water. Taste the water."

"Taste the—?" Connie started to say, and then recoiled at Amethyst's warning glance. She stooped and brushed her fingertips through the surf, and then touched her lips and gagged. "Yup. That's seawater," she coughed.

"Exactly. Water can be whatever it wants to be," Amethyst said. "It can take any shape."

"Technically, it just takes the shape of its container," noted Connie.

"Exactly," Amethyst said again in that same maddeningly calm tone. "You are the container. Your essence is water. Your container is also, like, seventy per cent water thanks to your human bod, so that puts you even closer, if you think about it. That's Lesson One."

"But you said Lesson One was…" Connie bit back another question. If she interrogated every seemingly nonsensical thing Amethyst said, she would never find the true sense behind them. This was a different sort of training than she was used to, but it was still Gem training, and she had to try her best. "Okay. What do I… I mean, tell me what to do next," she said.

"Close your eyes," Amethyst told her, and shut her own eyes as example. "Feel the water. Wait for it to show you the way."

So Connie waited, and waited. The rhythm of the ocean lulled her into a trance that looked suspiciously similar to, but definitely was not, boredom. She tried to imagine the edges of herself as an outline she could push and stretch against the cold water at her legs. When that didn't work, she tried imagining that outline being washed away by the water to leave the whole of her unbound, as free as the water itself. But still, her shape remained its shape.

Then a larger wave surged up from behind her, swallowing Connie up to the navel in frigid water. She yelped and staggered forward as the wave pushed past them to spill white foam across the shore.

"Whoops. Big one snuck up on us," Amethyst said, spitting up a stream of water as her eyes opened and her hair sagged wetly behind her. "Um, I mean, what did the water tell you?"

Everything below Connie's armpits was soaked to the point of clinging. Her knees quaked as the dampness seeped into places wholly unprepared to be damp and cold in so sudden a fashion. "It's telling me to stand closer to shore," she said through chattering teeth.

A smile split Amethyst's placid face. "Well, at least you're on speaking terms now," she said.

* * *

After too long, Amethyst let them out of the surf, making her soggy trainee wait on the sand while she retrieved something from the temple for the next part of their training. Much to Connie's disappointment, Amethyst did not return with a towel.

"It seemed like you and the water weren't having a good talk yet," Amethyst said, dragging an old cardboard box behind her. "But that's okay. It just means we start with the basic-basics first. So let's start over at Lesson One."

By Connie's count, this was the third first lesson. "Can Lesson One be something about putting on dry underwear?" Connie pleaded, still shivering.

"Hey, no questions! Don't you remember Lesson One?" Amethyst said. Then she cleared her throat and nudged the box forward, and began to lecture. "Now, Lesson One: if you want your shape to change, you have to want to change your shape."

Connie blinked, but said nothing.

"Don't look at me in that tone of voice. I'm totally serious. We're talking want-want-want it! It's deeper than skin, deeper than guts, deeper than your stone, all the way down to your bottom." The Gem twisted around and waggled her butt by way of example.

 _Jade's stone_ , Connie corrected silently. She also swallowed her suspicions at this new direction in her super-secret training.

The box jangled as Amethyst dug into its folds with gusto. "So I came up with a little motivation for you to change." Her fists emerged from the box with two long, filthy black chains trailing down from them. With another tug she drew out the chains' ends, each of which featured a large black ball forged from pockmarked iron. She watched the horror dawning on Connie's face and said, "What? I cleaned the bones out of them."

The irresistible force of booking flashed Ficklepedia articles about medieval torture and imprisonment behind Connie's eyes. "Leg irons?" she said, staring at the ancient shackles.

Amethyst grinned. "Yeah! I picked 'em up a while back in France. Not sure what all the fuss was about, but heads were really rolling, let me tell you. Anywho…"

The Gem's elbows glowed, and her arms stretched to cross the distance to Connie in a flash. Before Connie knew what had happened, she heard two loud _klak_ sounds and felt the weight of cold steel through her socks. She jumped in surprise, and the grip on her ankles dragged her backwards onto the sand. Just as she'd feared, she saw the leg irons clapped around her legs, their weighted black balls pillowed in the sand before her.

"Hey!" Connie yelped.

" _C'est magnifique_! Now the only way you're getting out of those doohickeys is if you shape your feet out of the cuffs." Amethyst declared.

Part of Connie felt relieved that Amethyst was pulling this exercise after the part where they had stood out in the tide instead of before or during. The rest of her was lost as her mind tried unsuccessfully to book any information about lockpicking. She would have to find a how-to guide for later.

"I guess spending a day in these things will be good motivation," Connie admitted, rising carefully and testing the new weight of each leg.

Amethyst scoffed. "A day? Who has that kind of time? You wanted results proto, so we're gonna get 'em!" With another flash, Amethyst's ribs erupted with two more sets of arms, the new limbs arranged in matching rows below the normal pair. A dangerous smile lit the new octopod's features as she advanced on Connie, wriggling all thirty of her fingers.

A storm of tickling descended upon Connie, turning her protests into shrieking laughter as she twisted away from Amethyst's touch, only to find it waiting for her no matter what direction she picked. With no protection but her wet, sandy clothes, and with less than half as many hands as she needed to defend herself, Connie kicked her way free and tried to run. The leg irons dragged behind her feet, making her tactical withdrawal more of a jerky, halting stagger instead.

Giggling, Amethyst gave chase, catching Connie with a pinch or a poke every time the girl tried to dodge. "Lesson One!" cackled Amethyst. "The Four S's: static students suffer silliness. Now shift out of those dumb things!"

The chains behind Connie tangled, throwing her to the sand again, and Amethyst pounced before she could heave herself back to her feet. Connie squirmed and howled, tears rimming her eyes while she laughed uncontrollably. Finally she kicked enough of a gap between Amethyst's legs to crawl backwards under the Gem and scramble into a new retreat.

Connie ran up and down the beach, splashing through the tide and around the old shards of temple that had fallen eons ago. She clattered up the porch and over the rail, knocking her birds askew and nearly hanging herself by her feet on the rail. No matter which way she went, though, Amethyst was always there to encourage her with unrelenting tickles. And no matter how hard Connie laughed, how hard her ribs hurt or how out of breath she grew, her ankles refused to change their shape to slip free of their cuffs.

After an eternity of torture, Connie finally broke, collapsing onto the beach and struggling to breathe, her arms wrapped around her chest just to hold it together. "I give," she wheezed. "Mercy! Uncle! No more!"

Amethyst considered her pupil with satisfaction as she leaned back, flashing away her extra limbs. "Well, your feet are still the same, but at least your face is in a better shape than it was. I was worried that sour puss of yours would be permanent. Can't human faces get stuck if they make a face too long?"

A few more gulps of air quenched the fire in Connie's lungs, and then she sat up, pushing her familiar scowl through drying tears. As she stood, she looked down at her soaked and rumpled clothes, which were caked in a castle's worth of sand. "You're taking this seriously, right? You're not just goofing on me?" Connie said.

Gasping, Amethyst clutched at her gemstone and looked appropriately scandalized. "How could you even ask me that? Do you even remember Lesson One? I bet you'd never question Pearl like that."

"Actually, Pearl encourages me to ask questions—"

The long raspberry Amethyst blew into her palm drowned out Connie's retort. "Okay, time to change it up again," Amethyst declared, wiping her palm on her shirt. "Let's go get a snack!"

* * *

The bell over The Big Donut's door jangled merrily for Amethyst, and then rattled like a slow cough as Connie oozed through it, her leg irons chattering on the linoleum floor. The overwhelming smell of sugar and trans fats glazed every breath rattling in Connie's chest. Connie knew she was no slouch, and her morning runs in the sand had been getting incrementally longer all week, and her training with Pearl had made her fairly sturdy. But after being terrorized by Amethyst for the better part of who-knew-how-long, the trek up the steep hill to Beach City had felt like a thousand mile trek. She was running on fumes, and the leg irons were only getting heavier.

Her heartbeat was so loud in her ears that she barely heard the cheery voice greeting them from the counter, and looked up to see Sadie watching her with growing concern. The stocky blonde cast a suspicious look between Amethyst and her shackled student. Meanwhile, as though unwillingly conjured by the sound of the bell, Lars emerged from the back room, his hair crooked and arms stretching in the wake of what had probably been a nap. He glared disinterestedly at the trail of black scuff marks behind Connie and grunted, "Ugh. It's bad enough the tourists are back without you weirdos wrecking the place too."

"Everything okay here?" Sadie said. The pitch of her question seemed to be directed at Connie, as though she were waiting for the trainee to blink in Morse code to ask for rescue from a kidnapper.

Amethyst glanced back as though just now remembering Connie. "Oh, her? She's fine. I'm teaching her about Gem stuff. It's a Miyagi thing."

"What's a Miyagi?" Lars asked, sneering in confusion.

"Wave to the nice donut people, Connie," said Amethyst.

Connie was tempted to wave at Amethyst with a single finger, but her parents had raised her better than that. "'llo," she wheezed.

"Well, um, welcome to the neighborhood, Connie. I'm Sadie, and that's Lars," the blonde said uneasily.

The polite thing to do would have been to explain to Sadie how she had already met them as one-half of someone else. But thoughts of Stevonnie still prickled in Connie's heart, and she didn't have the breath to spare for any explanations anyway.

"Yeah, yeah," snapped Lars. "You want the welcome wagon, go bother the mayor. Now either order something or go make a mess somewhere else." He stooped behind the counter and came back with a broom and a dustpan for the caked mess that was still flaking off of Connie.

Amethyst scratched her chin in examination of the delights lined up in their glass case. "Gimmie a dozen chocolate, a dozen old fashioned, and…" She glanced back at Connie and said, "Did you want anything?"

"Water?" croaked Connie.

Sadie assembled the donuts in a box and topped it with a bottle of _H2WHOA!_ from the cooler. The register _blerped_ as she punched in the cost of the snack run. Then Sadie waited expectantly.

Amethyst snapped her fingers, stepping aside to clear a path to the register. "Pay the donut girl, Daniel-san," said the Gem.

Connie groaned and fished in her pocket. She didn't have much, but her parents had left her some spending money, and it would still spend even if it was a little soggy. But when she stepped forward to slap a bill on the counter, Amethyst's foot came down on the chains of her leg irons, nearly sprawling her flat. "Hey!" she cried, jerking to a halt.

"Don't pay like a human, all boring and blah," Amethyst said. The Gem's arms shifted to five times their normal length and traversed the store like a pair of extremely confused crazy straws. "Gems pay from far away! If ever. Shift your steez!"

Gritting her teeth, Connie extended the bill as far as her arm would allow, and then tried to push it farther. Her elbow started screaming at her. Then her shoulder joined in chorus. She leaned as far as she could, but Amethyst's foot kept her in place. "Almost," grunted Connie.

Lars buried his face in his palms and groaned. Sadie, looking even more worried, started to make her way around the counter. "Are you okay? I can come and get that for you."

"No!" Lars and Amethyst snapped at the same time.

"Allllmmmmoossst…" Connie moaned.

Blocking Sadie, Lars spread his arms and snapped, "We just started the busy season. If we do some stupid courtesy payment pickup whatever for one person, soon enough they're all going to want it! Then delivery! And who knows what after that! I'm not doing that ever every weirdo who comes in here," he declared.

"This isn't just some weirdo," retorted Amethyst. "This is a very important weirdo! She's a Gem in training, and I won't let you mess up her very delicate and extremely well-planned training exercise with your donut clerking!"

Connie tried to shut out their voices and focus on the watery feeling in her limbs, hoping that it was shapeshiftiness and not simple exhaustion. "Allllllllmmmmmmmmooosssssssstt…"

"Wait, she's got one of those rocks too?" Lars cried, and his eyes fixed on Connie's neck. "Isn't Steven bad enough on his own?"

"Hey!" Sadie snapped. "Be nice to Steven!"

"I want those donuts, rookie!" Amethyst bellowed.

Rolling his eyes, Lars snapped, "There's already too many rainbow freaks as it is, and now Steven goes and plugs a new monster rock into—"

Connie felt her hair flip over her shoulders, and she jerked forward at the force of a tremendous wind as thick and heavy as a telephone pole that exploded from her outstretched hand. She landed hard, blinded and shocked by the sudden pain in her knees, and clawed the hair out of her eyes.

She was lucky compared to Lars. Through a cloud of floating napkin tatters, Connie saw the lanky teen hanging limply from the shelf inside the donut case he had been blasted into. By some small miracle, the case had already been open from Sadie's gathering of their order, meaning that Lars was covered in the remnants of a donut rain instead of glass shards from the case's open door. He looked too dazed to appreciate the near miss, however, though it was hard to gauge his expression with the twenty-dollar bill pasted to his face under a thick glue of frosting and glaze, which was blasted across his front thanks to the box of donuts from the counter that had also been caught in Connie's gale.

Connie and Sadie just blinked at the fallen Lars while the rain of napkins gently blanketed the store. Amethyst winced, sucking a breath through her teeth. "Can I switch the old fashioned to some bear claws instead?" she said, and grimaced at her former order adorning Lars' limp body.

* * *

Half a bottle of water had eased the desert of Connie's throat. She slouched on The Big Donut's patio seating, drumming her fingers against the remaining half of her water as she leaned far enough back so she could see the store upside-down behind her. Her feet kicked idly underneath the table, their chains clattering. She sighed.

As the breath left her, Connie thought she heard something following the gentle sound. It was a whisper, a murmur, tickling her brain from the very lowest edges of her hearing. For a moment, she stilled, and tried to grasp the sound, leaning even farther back to tilt her ear.

It was the gentle breeze stirring around her, shifting through her long curtain of hair, gliding around her skin and clothes. The sound was so soft that it almost felt as though she couldn't hear it with her ears at all, but instead with—

"Hey."

Amethyst emerged from the store, and the sound of her voice startled Connie from the trance, knocking her off the bench with a yelp. The chains dragged up the other side of the bench with their weights dangling pendulously.

The purple Gem sat next to Connie's chains, setting aside the cardboard pastry box she'd carried out with her, and looked down at her felled student. With a twisting expression, Amethyst made a hideous wet sound with the back of her throat, and then horked up an old skeleton key the same color and material as Connie's shackles. With a turn of the key, the old irons dropped free, clanking onto the pavement, and Connie's legs felt gloriously lighter.

"Good news: the donut boy lives," Amethyst said as she helped Connie back to her seat. "He's already awake and complaining again. Bad news: Greg owes a lot of money, and somebody who's not me needs to tell him how many squished donuts he just bought. But, more good news: they gave me some non-squished donuts to get rid of me!" She opened the box to reveal a fresh dozen glistening, glazed little treasures.

Connie said nothing.

Sighing, Amethyst grabbed a donut and bit it in half. Her cheek bulged as she sidled the bite to speak around it. "So, I forgot to tell you Lesson One about my shapeshifting training. There is no Lesson One, or any lessons. I can't teach you how to shapeshift. Nobody can. But the way you're glaring at nothing right now, I kind of assume you already knew that."

Staring at her feet, Connie watched the red rawness fade from her skin from where the irons had clasped her.

"Gems don't really learn Gem stuff. It's like, nobody taught you how to breathe or be hungry. They didn't, right? I've always just kind of assumed." The Gem shrugged. "So, sorry. And sorry for lying to you, because it turns out it kind of was a goof. But a good goof. I mean, a goof for good, not just a goof that goofed well. Though I guess it was that too."

Connie's fingers rolled in and out of a fist, remembering the wind that had blown her money into Lars with the force of a cannon blast.

"You are way, way, way more serious than Steven was when he was learning this stuff. Which is okay. That's your steez, and you rock it. But it always seemed like the best way Steven learned this stuff was figuring it out on his own on his powers' time, not his," Amethyst said earnestly, swallowing her donut. "And whenever it got too frustrating for him, and Pearl was too fussy, or Garnet was too wrapped up in herself, I helped him just chill out and get through it. That's what I can do for you. That's what I want to do with you. Because you're a fun dude to be around. Just cut yourself a little slack."

Connie stared down at her palm, her gaze tracing the lines in her skin. She thought back to that outburst in the store, and she almost heard that sub-audible whisper in the air again. Then she said, "No."

"Oh, come on!" Amethyst cried, spraying flecks from her second donut. "I spent, like, ten minutes coming up with that whole speech inside! I had to stand there while donut girl fished donut boy out of all of the donuts I didn't pay for, and it was super-awkward!"

Shaking her head, Connie insisted, "That was the best wind blast I've ever done on my own, and I almost meant to do it. I mean, I didn't want to hurt Lars, and I felt really bad afterward, but when he started talking about Jade's gemstone, I…"

Taking up a third donut, Amethyst heaved a crumby sigh and said, "It's not exactly chill, but I guess it did kind of work."

Nodding, Connie said, "It did! All this crazy stuff did something. So, do you think we can keep doing it?"

Amethyst grinned around a mouthful. "I'll make you a deal. On my days with you, we'll come up with one—ONE—intense, crazy, non-chill thing to try for tricking your powers into gear. But after that doesn't work, we'll find something chill and-slash-or fun to do. Deal?"

The grin she had been fighting back suddenly won across Connie's face. "Deal, she agreed.

The Gem sagged backwards in relief. "Good. I don't think I could have faked another test thing for you to do. You kept crushing it." Smiling sidelong, she added, "Pearl was right about you. You are a good student. And I'm a good teacher. Heh. Can you believe she thought I needed advice for how to handle today?"

Connie's grin turned sheepish at the praise, and she hid it behind a donut of her own. "Do you have another Lesson One for me, Miyagi-sempai?"

"Just one more." Amethyst tapped donuts with Connie, and they both echoed a _clink_ noise to each other. "No matter how tough it gets, a bad day is always better with donuts."


	12. One Question

"There's really nothing to worry about. I promise."

Connie bit her lip to keep her frustrations buttoned inside of her. She appreciated Steven's reassurance, but hearing it over and over again only made her worry more. Obviously her face betrayed her, or he wouldn't be repeating himself every sixty seconds like clockwork. Hunching over the kitchen counter from atop her stool, she tried hiding her face in her bowl of _It's Bran_ , watching the little cereal cubes drift in a circle as she stirred her spoon without eating.

"Garnet's just quiet. She doesn't mean anything by it," Steven said a minute later. "And, hey, of all the Gems, I'm pretty sure she's almost-killed me the least. So that makes it easier, right?"

Today would be her first day with Garnet. Her first time alone with Garnet.

She had enough presence of mind to ignore all of the worst impulses of anxiety. No matter what her worst imaginings told her, she knew the fusion wouldn't suddenly declare Connie unworthy of her time, or a pain in her stones, or anything so dramatic. But she knew so little about Garnet that she had no clue of what to expect, or what they might do together. How could she steel herself for the unexpected when she couldn't even imagine what to expect besides disaster?

A begrudging spoonful of cereal made it through her grimace. If nothing else, she knew she didn't want to be faint with hunger when Garnet came calling. "It's fine, Steven," she said, trying to sound convincing. "I just don't want to mess this up. You know?"

Steven smiled gamely around a dribble of milk. "You're just spending time together. You can't mess that up."

"Good advice."

Both teens jumped at the sudden words. Garnet had walked up soundlessly to stand behind them. Her bejeweled hand already hung poised to keep Connie from toppling off the stool. Connie would have been impressed at the Gem's natural stealth, but she could only wonder how much of her whinging Garnet had heard, and how mortified she should be.

"Hey, Garnet!" Steven chirped. "We were just talking about you. Were your ears burning?"

Garnet's head tilted. "Not yet, but maybe later. Right now, it's my day with Connie. I'd like to go now, if you're ready," she said, directing the last at the red-faced Connie.

"Ready!" Connie squeaked, jerking upright. She wouldn't have dared say otherwise even if she'd broken both her legs in her fall. Hopping from foot to foot, she tried to turn her anxiety into something that looked like eagerness. "I spent the morning prepping anything I might need: survival gear, navigational tools, rations. Just tell me what to bring."

Garnet shrugged.

As seconds ticked by, Connie realized that had been the entirety of the Gem's answer. "Um, weapons?" she suggested uneasily.

A glint crossed Garnet's visor. "Bring what you need to feel safe."

Connie started to ask for more, but then stopped. Garnet didn't seem inclined to offer more details, so badgering her for them might be the wrong thing to do. Perhaps this was Garnet's way of testing her, seeing what Connie thought she might need without being prompted. A secret test! Already, she could feel her breakfast churning, but she stuffed the feeling down and focused. Connie knew tests. She could do this.

Hurriedly she rushed to her footlocker. Her carefully organized equipment sat on top of it, but she only took a moment to consider before she rejected most of it. Instead, she picked up a sheath and saber, both gleaming as if new, and strapped the blade over her V-neck shirt. At Pearl's suggestion, and with the Gem's generous providing, she had taken a saber from the arsenal kept up at the Sky Arena for practice on her own time. The blade was no equal to the sword she had lost, but it was still expertly forged, and more than capable of dealing out harm where harm was needed.

When she ran back from the living room, Garnet was already waiting for her on the warp pad. As Connie hurried to join her, the Gem's hand stopped her, proffering a box of tissues. Connie balked at the odd offering, and said, "Um, no thanks. I don't think I'll need those."

Garnet tossed the tissue box aside, offering no explanation for the offer or comment on the refusal. More cautiously, Connie made to step onto the warp pad, but Garnet held up an empty hand this time to stop her.

"Before we start," the Gem said, fixing Connie with a serious look made mystery by her mirrored visor, "there's one last thing: you only get to ask one question today."

Connie stared, horrified. She wasn't alone, as Steven gasped at the proclamation. "Only one question?"

"Yes," said Garnet.

"How come?" he insisted.

"I can't answer that. You already used your question," Garnet told him.

Steven grimaced. "Aw, nuts," he cursed. Then he shrugged, and decided, "Eh, no regrets."

"Luckily, Connie still has her question," the Gem added, turning her visor back upon the quaking teen in question. Garnet's hand dropped, and she said, "Now, if you're ready, we can go."

Connie swallowed hard. She already had a hundred questions she wanted to ask Garnet about this new, seemingly arbitrary question cap, and that was on top of the thousands of ever-present questions she had about being a Gem, living with Gems, Gem history, Gem culture, their Homeworld, and everything in between. But she swallowed again, letting those questions fall back into the pool of _It's Bran_ inside of her. "Ready," she said, feeling anything but.

" _Bon voyage_!" Steven called as the warp tunnel swept away the pair.

As the white light rushed around them, Connie felt her questions squirming back up her throat. _Where are we going? What's going to happen? Why only one question? Are questions dangerous where we're going?_ Garnet's implacable bearing gave her nothing. She tried to think of which question to ask, the one that would give her what she needed, the one that would impress the mysterious fusion the most.

And when her feet landed on the new pad, all of those questions evaporated, leaving her speechless.

The curtain of light fell, revealing a lush valley of greenery rolling out from the pad in every direction. Thick, bright globs of color dappled the fields with glistening reds that peered out through leaves. A sweet fragrance hung in the air, too sugary to be floral, and it rode a breeze that felt cooler than the summer heat they had left behind. By the crispness and thinness of the air, and the impossibly clear blue of the sky overhead, Connie guessed they had landed somewhere at a high altitude.

As her gaze fell back from the horizon, Connie saw the source of the sweet fragrance, and gasped. Those red blotches among the greenery belonged to strawberries. These berries were a far cry from those in the plastic cartons her mother brought home from the grocery store. The smallest of the berries was bigger than a pumpkin, and the largest of them might have crushed Connie if she tried to pick them. Every strawberry around her looked and smelled perfectly ripe, impossibly so. And there were thousands of them. Tens of thousands, stretching for miles in every direction she could see. And they were the least of the wondrousness before her.

Sitting among the fields, less than a mile away, stood a pyramid balanced on its tip. Its brown stone looked unmarred in spite of its obvious age, for only Gems could build such an impossibility of architecture. She recognized the glyphs on its sides from the old leather journal of Buddy Buddwick's that she and Steven had poured over, and knew its importance from a story Steven had related to her. It was a temple of traps and mysteries, one the Gems had already conquered. Would Garnet take her there? Had the Gems forgotten something from their first visit to the pyramid?

And beyond the pyramid, halfway to the horizon, sat large pieces of a cliffside that had been shattered. Those pieces of the cliff hung aloft in the sky, risen up by some unseen power, their caps still tufted with grass from when they had been a part of the landscape. What had broken the cliff in such a gruesome way? Or was it instead the beginnings of some construction left unfinished when the war began?

One question. Connie couldn't make do with one million questions!

The enormity of the fields bore down on Connie until she felt dizzy. "Is this…?" she started to ask.

Garnet cocked her head back at Connie, waiting for her to finish.

The words caught in Connie's throat. She reeled them back, shaking her head, and instead offered in a quavering voice, "This is the battlefield. 'The' battlefield. This is where the war ended."

Garnet stepped off the pad. Reds and greens rippled across her visor before she turned it to the sky, making it flash with the sunlight. "The war ended everywhere. This is where I was standing when it did." The Gem began to walk, choosing one of the worn paths between the foliage.

As Connie's feet followed numbly, her imagination wandered ahead of them, rushing across the rise and fall of the landscape as she tried to picture what had come in the time long before. She knew that the Gems had cleaned up the land, maybe more than once, yet she could still see the rusty echoes of battle in blades and hilts that jutted out of the ground all around them. Far in the distance, she could see a divot missing from an entire ridge, and next to it, the brown rusted carcass of a sword as big as a city bus. What kind of mighty fusion had wielded such a blade that it could change the landscape for thousands of years to come? Who had made such a fusion, and what had they been like? Were they shattered or corrupted?

Maybe the floating cliffside had been blasted by some kind of Homeworld weapon, launched from a ship looming above the battlefield. Surely hundreds of ships must have filled the air, trading fire, or peppering the combatants below. Had one of their cannons shattered the landscape with such force that it still hung there today, forever shattered? What kind of weapon could do such a thing? Did they still exist?

Connie jolted back to reality and realized she was alone. Garnet had moved ahead, following a new, less-trod path between the strawberries. As she hurried to catch up, Connie's toes snagged on a strawberry runner, and she nearly planted her face into a giant berry as her knees struck the dirt. Her heart seized in her chest when her palm hit the ground less than an inch away from the tip of a filthy, ancient sword that was sprouting among the greens.

Garnet was next to her again before she realized it, offering her bejeweled hand. As Connie rose, she stared down at the relic that had almost split her palm. "Is that a—" Connie started to ask, and then pressed her lips flat.

The silent fusion watched her, waiting, reflecting Connie's own frustration back at her with quiet patience.

Clearing her throat, Connie carefully declared, "I guess it's hard to clean up all of the weapons when time keeps changing what's buried."

The corner of Garnet's mouth twitched, and her gaze rose back to the horizon. "Even with the pyramid deactivated, this place is still dangerous. That's why we tell humans to stay away."

It was hard to imagine human willingly giving up a perpetually ripe bounty of fruit. If anything, she would have imagined some huge factory on the next ridge, its smoke stacks belching smog as it rendered strawberries into jams, jellies, candies, perfumes, lip balms, and who knew what else. Just the idea conjured images of Amethyst chasing centuries' worth of venture capitalists out of the fields, and she giggled.

"This place must have looked really different back then if natural erosion is still uncovering these weapons," Connie said.

"It did," said Garnet.

When Garnet's pause kept going, Connie said too innocently, "I can't imagine what it must have looked like."

Garnet met the obvious bait with silence.

Huffing, Connie tried to think of another hook that might get the Gem talking. They were treading on history itself, cresting a ridge that might have been the site of Earth's liberation from intergalactic tyranny. The limit of a single question felt like it would choke the very sanity out of Connie. She wanted to scream. She needed to know all of it, everything! All around her were the echoes of excitement, and battle, and—

…and war.

" _Then I heard it coming from the sky. It was…beautiful. Terrible. I did not hear it in my ears, but in my very stone. It was inside of me. And… And suddenly I was not a Jade anymore."_

Jade's story, her final moments in the war, pierced Connie's imagination to turn her thrilling battlespace white with the force of a living sound. Three notes rang from Connie's memories, resonant, terrible. Three desperate Gems had huddled beneath a pink shield to become the only survivors of the battle. All of the ships, the grand and lumbering fusions, the countless warriors on both sides, vanished in one moment. One awful moment.

Connie missed another step as she looked across the fields. Every glimpse of the Gem war that had shaped their planet had tantalized her. She could learn everything about that history and still she would hunger for more, always more. But it wasn't history to Garnet. It was memory.

Garnet had invited Connie to walk through the worst moment of the fusion's life, and had offered Connie one question. Connie couldn't imagine she would be so generous with her own past. Did Garnet mean this gesture as a demonstration of trust? Was it a test after all? Was Garnet daring Connie to pry, or was she waiting to see if Connie lacked the courage to ask anything of substance?

She looked around them, and saw everything she needed to know. These fields were an important place, a dangerous place, a bad memory, a victory and a defeat, a remembrance of friends lost and times past. The details belonged to the people who had lived it. If they chose to share it, they would, on their own terms and in their own time.

If Connie ever truly needed to know more, she would become a true historian, and give those times and its peoples their due respect. She would not play tourist in something so hallowed.

"Garnet," said Connie, "I'm ready to ask my question."

The Gem stopped again, once more waiting patiently.

Connie's hand rested atop one of the enormous berries beside their path. Her fingers tested the nubby surface, the seeds in the skin rasping against her palm. "What made the strawberries here so big?"

A slow smile pushed across Garnet's face. "That's an interesting use of your only question," she teased.

Deciding to take a cue from her guide, Connie answered with a shrug. That only made Garnet's smile wider.

Her smile didn't last, though, as Garnet's visor turned back the way they had come. Connie followed her gaze to the top of a ridge near the warp pad where the strawberries were thickest and the greenery stood as high as Connie's waist.

"It was Rose," Garnet said.

Connie felt her chest tighten.

"After it ended, and Rose dropped her shield, we all saw what had happened. Our friends, our enemies, were all different. Twisted. We were all that was left." A tremor ran through Garnet's arm at the force of her clenched fist. "When she realized what had happened, Rose started to cry. And she didn't stop."

The lush green ridge told its own story to Connie now. As she stared, she thought she could see a swirl in the way the plants grew, as if there remained some focal point hidden under their leaves. Maybe it was foolish to think that plants could remember such a shape after countless generations. But Rose Quartz had possessed amazing powers to imbue plants with shape, power, and purpose. Maybe she could give them memory as well. Or maybe they wanted to remember.

"It was days. Or maybe weeks. It's hard to remember. Pearl and I weren't much better, but Rose… It's as if she took it personally. Like what the Diamonds did was somehow her fault." Garnet bowed her head. "She just kept crying. And as she did, she made something beautiful out of…this."

Connie felt the weight of that final word fall like a hammer on an anvil. The word felt like a burden of its own, one that Connie could feel a fraction of now. "Thank you for telling me that," Connie murmured.

Garnet nodded. "You're welcome."

As they resumed their path, a new silence settled around them, one more comfortable now that Connie had shed all of her worries about her time with the Gem. Connie couldn't tell if Garnet had a destination or a purpose in mind, but that didn't seem to matter anymore.

Unbidden, Connie felt a smirk twisting in her lips. "I know what you were doing. With the one question thing," she couldn't resist telling her guide. "You want me to figure things out for myself. I have to be able to find my own answers if I'm going to be a real Crystal Gem. You're teaching me, but you're being sneakier about it than Pearl is."

The Gem nodded, and admitted, "That's true." Then she looked back at Connie with her own smirk to match her student's. "But I also know how smart and curious you are. If I let you, we would be here forever answering your questions."

Connie couldn't help but laugh. "I guess I can be pretty bad sometimes."

"Mostly I just enjoy taking quiet walks with people I like," Garnet answered.

The comment filled Connie's chest with warmth, and she hoped it didn't spread into a blush on her face. She took a deep, peaceful breath and let it out in a long sigh.

Her lungs prickled at the breath, and she wrinkled her nose. "What smells like burning pie?" she said without thinking.

Garnet didn't comment on Connie's gross breach of the only rule she had set for the teen that day. Instead, she turned her face into the breeze, and Connie saw the fusion's brows dip behind her visor in a concerned frown. A glint flashed in Garnet's face. Then she bent low and wrapped an arm around Connie's waist. "Stay quiet and hold on," she commanded.

Connie held back another slew of questions and grasped the Gem's arm to steady herself as Garnet took off running. Garnet's legs were a blur beneath them as they traversed the fields, the greenery moving past them in one long blur interrupted by flashes of strawberry red. Squinting into the wind, Connie watched them moving from ridge to ridge faster than she had ever traveled across land without a car to do the work for her. Yet she felt as safe in Garnet's arm as she would have inside of any seatbelt. She just wished her stomach could keep up with their breakneck pace.

Though Garnet did the running for both of them, Connie still felt her heart pounding against her ribs. This kind of speed could only mean that they were running toward something important. It could be a new danger Garnet had spotted, or some corruption rampaging through the fruit.

But instead, as they stopped upon a ridge that appeared identical to any of the other ridges around them and peered into the valley beyond, they found a spaceship.


	13. Mediocre UFO

Connie had only seen a few Gem vessels since her induction as one of Earth's defenders. The Homeworld Rubies' ship, now parked at the farm, was a red teardrop of a ship, something sleek meant as an interceptor or a scouting vessel. The ship that had brought Peridot and Jasper was sheer elegance, a battleship so powerful and mind-bogglingly huge that it could afford to put form ahead of function in its hand-like shape. This new batch of invaders had brought a personal-sized flying saucer, almost too stereotypically alien to be believed, but with speed and privacy that suggested it was a luxury more than a necessity. Though all different, each design held a core of beauty to it that belied the artistry behind everything Gemkind had ever done. Theirs was a culture inexorably linked to high aesthetics that outshone their commitment to functionalism.

This new spaceship was a box. It was rectangles on all six sides, each flat plane made from some matte, gray, boring alloy. Even its thruster assembly was just a pair of rectangles glowing in the aft of the ship. She couldn't see a cockpit, but she had to imagine it with a rectangular viewport peering out from a control station made of crisp right angles and crewed by some flat, boring Gem. Perhaps a Bauxite?

This mediocre UFO might have offended Connie if she wasn't already thrilled and terrified by the aliens milling around their ship's landing area. She recognized all three of them, and chilled at the sound of their conversation drifting up the rise of the hill.

"Flint," Milky Quartz whined, "don't hurt those poor animals." The massive Gem patrolled the edge of the shallow valley in which their spaceship had landed. Her bulk strained against her gray tunic as though she couldn't have imagined an outfit large enough to contain her pale white hugeness when she had formed her own body. Her one prominent, malformed arm, itself as long as Milky was tall and bigger around than any Crystal Gem, was lifted before her as Milky patrolled.

The gemstone in Milky's giant palm glinted, and Connie knew that it would douse her and Garnet's presence if it happened to aim in their direction. Finding Gems in hiding was Milky's purpose, her design, and poofing those hidden Gems seemed to be her pleasure.

"Oh, gerroff it, Milky." Flint, the Gem who answered Milky, was the bigger Quartz's polar opposite: spindly and lithe, colored dusky gray underneath a sleek suit of black and red, and topped with a puff of bright red hair that framed a seemingly perpetual sneer. Flames wreathed the slender Gem's hands as she stalked up to an unsuspecting strawberry bunch. "We're securing the perimeter like we were told. Not my fault if these squidgers don't have the sense to run." Her cupped flames became a jet of fire that billowed over the plant, turning root and stem and fruit all into a withered black husk.

Connie winced at the bright orange flames, and then winced harder at the dozens of little black craters that littered the valley where identical burnings had clearly happened. Flint's little deforestation game explained the smell that had drawn Connie and Garnet from across the battlefield. Really, they were lucky Flint hadn't burned everything to the ground, like Connie knew the skinny Quartz could do and would relish doing.

She almost said as much out loud without thinking. Luckily, Garnet stopped her by dragging the both of them behind a large bunch of strawberries at the edge of the ridge, giving them a vantage of the enemy Gems from hiding.

For a heartbeat, Connie feared they had been spotted when she saw Milky's shaggy white mane twitch in their direction. But the big Quartz kept up her regular patrol, circling the area as she had done before. "Aw, I think they're pretty," Milky told Flint. "And they're fun to squish!" She lifted her boot high and pulverized a strawberry as big as Connie's head to demonstrate, grinning at the red pulp dripping from her heel.

"I think it's cute how you both finally found something on this planet you can win a fight against." The chills returned as Connie listened to the third Gem's taunts. She remembered Pyrite well, from her powerful golden frame swathed in a garish leotard patterned with flames, to her glittering black cape slung from one shoulder over that arm, to the mirrored visor that framed her face beneath a sheet of deep purple hair. Even just leaning against the ship, Pyrite stood nearly as tall as Milky, almost as broad, but with a build that spoke of power instead of bulk. "But let me know if you want to tag me in to finish them off for you," Pyrite added mockingly.

The smugness in Pyrite's tone made Connie bristle. Her heart thumped furiously at the memory of Pyrite taunting her back at Ascension, of how powerless Connie had felt when she watched the bigger Gem tear through Ruby, and Steven, and Jade…

A sudden touch from Garnet startled Connie. The fusion rested a hand atop Connie's, which had unconsciously drifted to the hilt strapped at her shoulder. Bashfully, Connie let her hand drop from her sword.

"So funny. You must have a speck of Spinel wedged inside you," Flint jeered back at Pyrite. The flames snuffed from the lanky Quartz's fists as she kicked through the husk, scattering black clods across the grass.

"You fought a Spinel?" Milky asked in disbelief.

"No," grunted Pyrite. Her fingers absently fiddled with the hem of her cape. "Wait: one, yes."

Flint whistled. "Are you having a laugh? Which glittery upper crust was mean enough to drop their chuckle factory into the Brackets?"

"Who else? Yellow Diamond." Pyrite's cape glittered with a thousand different motes of iridescent color as she appreciated it. "It was a quick match. Though the Spinel had reach. And she was funny."

As Pyrite shifted to straighten her cape, a glimpse of pink color emerged over her shoulder. Connie's jaw tightened, holding in her scream of frustration as she saw the hilt hanging behind Pyrite's shoulder. It was Rose Quartz's sword strapped to the golden soldier's back by a pair of new belts formed into her leotard. Pyrite must have taken the sword as her trophy following the Battle of Ascension, which explained why the Crystal Gems hadn't found it in the aftermath. Connie had wondered if their enemies might have destroyed the sword out of spite, but seeing it on the Gem who had knocked her around with such ease was somehow worse.

Once more, Garnet had to reach a hand to stop Connie from drawing her borrowed saber.

Motion from the side of the spaceship distracted Connie from her anger. A portion of the ship's hull had folded outward, emerging from some invisible seam to lower into a ramp and hatch—both of which, of course, being shaped rectangularly. The dark interior of the ship came to light with a sudden glow, revealing stacks of bland, cube-shaped crates. One entire stack of the crates levitated down the ramp while a new voice emerged from within the ship.

"Flint, your recreational kindling is actually flora, not fauna. Not that I would credit a Quartz with knowing the difference." As the crates settled onto the ground, a new Gem emerged from behind them. Spindly legs carried her down the ramp in slow, measured strides as she surveyed her new surroundings. She was tall, thin, wrapped in a pristine white bodysuit and donned in a trim, long white coat that flared at the waist. Long yellowish fingers peered out of the coat's oversized sleeves, and lemony yellow features turned to take in the fields with a sour expression.

Pyrite's expression soured to match the new Gem's. "Welcome to Earth. And yes, it really is this ugly all over," she told the newcomer.

"Charming." The yellow Gem ran a hand over her hair, a black tuft atop her head so straight and flat that Connie would have sworn it was part of the Gem's head until she watched it bristle under those long fingers. "Now, be a good brute and unload the remainder of my equipment. I need to acquaint myself with the survey notes on this hideous planet."

Pyrite turned on the officious new Gem, her brow crushing against the rim of her visor in a scowl. "What did you say to me?" she growled.

With the golden warrior turned away from where they hid, Connie could fully see Rose's sword strapped to Pyrite's back. The sword seemed achingly close…

A tug from Garnet pulled Connie deeper behind their strawberry cover. Connie thought she might have been craning out too far, but when she followed Garnet's gaze, she understood, and she froze. Across from their shelter, Milky Quartz's patrol was starting back in their direction. In seconds, the Quartz's dowsing hand would sense Garnet's gemstones, Jade's gemstone, and discover their snooping.

"I said to unload my equipment," the new Gem repeated slowly. "You brute."

Pyrite loomed, all but blocking the new Gem from Connie's view. "You're smart, Polarite. You should already know who is in charge here. But if you forgot, I'd be happy to remind you."

"You would be very unhappy, I think," the new Gem—Polarite—retorted.

Pyrite loomed even larger. And Milky grew even closer to the edge of the basin where Connie and Garnet crouched.

"You and your cohorts were sent here under the administration of Zircon. That is because Quartzes and, ahem, other combat resources require constant direction lest they become aimless engines of destruction," said Polarite. Her pointed sidelong glance indicated Flint, who had started to flambé another strawberry patch further up the ridge. "I, conversely, do not report to Zircon. I report directly to Shard herself."

The creak of Pyrite's clenching knuckles traveled all the way up to where Connie hid, the sound as clear as day to her. And looking the other way, Connie saw the edge of Milky's gemstone as the Gem's giant palm turned closer toward their direction.

"I am the one with the technical knowledge to realize Shard's vision. I am the one who will bring the Opulence back to its fully glory. I am the only one who could have salvaged the access codes to the Celerity Forge," Polarite bloviated. In a keenly smug tone, she added, "And now I am the one educating our combat resources on the finer points of hierarchy."

There was murder in Pyrite's body, drawn taut to the point of trembling in her fists. "We have a different hierarchy in the Brackets," said Pyrite, making the words an unmistakable threat.

"Then by all means, return to the Brackets," Polarite answered calmly. "Or stay here and unload my equipment."

Milky was less than a dozen feet from Connie and Garnet. Fists on her knees, Connie held her breath as the stone in Milky's palm began to glow, sensing their presence. A questioning hum rumbled in the Gem's chest as she wandered closer still.

"Milky!" Pyrite bellowed. "Get the thinker's schist off the ship."

The lumbering white Quartz stopped, and her gaze ping-ponged between the strawberry hiding spot and the ship below. "Okay, but there's—"

"Now!" Pyrite snarled with her glare fixed on Polarite.

Connie's lungs blazed as she waited and watched the hulking Quartz. For a moment, Milky looked like she wanted to protest again. But then she shrugged and ambled down the ridge. The breath finally wheezed out of Connie in a wave of relief as Milky squeezed herself through the hatch on the side of the ship.

"Do cheer up, Pyrite," Polarite said. "Shard is pleased with your work here, in spite of the resistance you've encountered. She even sent something personally to help deter encounters with those wartime relics."

With Milky gone, Connie risked peeking around the strawberries again. Polarite stood at one of her crates and worked her long fingers under its lid. From out of the crate she produced a small, smooth, oblong carton. And when she opened the carton, she revealed two golden spheres sitting across three little cradles inside. Even from a distance, Connie could see a faint glow around the spheres, and she felt a tingle run through her body as she looked upon them.

Pyrite grunted. "Two? What happened to the other one?" she asked as she accepted the carton from Polarite.

Polarite's measured expression broke for a smile. "I used one as a precaution. No Sapphire am I, but I can make educated predictions."

Connie's stomach lurched as her mind whirled with too many possibilities of what the orbs might be. Clearly they were some kind of super-weapon that could destroy the Crystal Gems with ease. And Conny had the chance to end their threat then and there. If she could just get her sword from Pyrite's back…

Another tug from Garnet pulled Connie off the strawberry just in time to hide her from Flint. The lanky Quartz had run out of berries in the valley, and was burning her way toward their hiding spot. The acrid smell of strawberries boiling in their own skin rolled ahead of Flint like a silent herald, prickling its warning in Connie's nose.

The last stack of crates made it off the boring rectangular spaceship courtesy of Milky. Even for such a burly Gem, there were too many stacks to carry at once. "Do you really need all of this stuff?" Milky asked, scratching her craggy, stalactite-riddled chin.

Polarite sniffed. "It will barely suffice if I am to resuscitate the Opulence before Shard arrives," she said.

The words stopped Flint in her tracks and snuffed the flames in her hands. "Here? So soon? I-Is she on her way now?" Flint stammered, looking back at the pompous Gem.

Pyrite looked nonplussed. "We only have the one ship, you mudbrick," she deadpanned.

Grumbling, Flint turned back to the strawberry patch, still seemingly unaware of what lay behind it. "Chisel yourself a smile, you great glittering showoff," she muttered. Her fingers rose, igniting again, ready to incinerate the bunch.

Connie gripped her sword, her legs coiled beneath her. At her side, a muffled flash revealed Garnet's gauntlets held in ready fists.

As the pilot light on Flint's fingertip began to flare, a sharp tone made it fizzle. "Flint!" barked Pyrite. "Stop messing with those whatever-they-ares and grab a stack. We'll need to haul this equipment to the warp pad."

Flint whirled again. "By hand?" she whined. "None of the thinkers in this operation had enough cracking genius to think of bringing along a lev?"

"How about I twist you into the shape of a cart and jam a couple of wheels into you instead?" Pyrite suggested.

Milky had already lifted two full crate stacks off the ground, her mismatched arms wrapped around each bottom box. "I don't think that would work. And it sounds like it would really hurt," she said.

"Can't be sure until we try," Pyrite retorted.

"I guess not," admitted Milky. "Flint, do you want your face at the front of the cart or the back? I think I'd get dizzy going everywhere backwards."

A ribbon of smoke escaped Flint's gnashing teeth. "Fine! Yes! Great! I'm coming already! A couple of brilliant Quartzes designed to be the perfect warriors, put to their best use to do the job of some missing tractor beams!"

Connie peered carefully, watching Flint stomp down the hill. Black footprints smoldered in the Quartz's wake. Grateful that Pyrite's impatience had granted them a second reprieve, Connie let her hand fall from her hilt and allowed herself a tiny sigh of relief.

The burning smell wafting up from Flint tickled in Connie's nose. Before she even realized it, before she could stop herself, she sneezed.


	14. Light's Emergence

Thanks to an insomnia-fueled Fiki-fest, Connie knew—and would know forever—that the sneeze is a semi-autonomous, convulsive expulsion of air from the lungs through the nose and mouth, usually caused by foreign particulates irritating the nasal mucosa. Sneezes were powerful, with windspeeds of up to a hundred miles per hour. Of all the things humans expelled, sneezes were among the most impressive and least-ish disgusting.

Some studies had measured the average sound of the sneeze at eighty to ninety decibels. But those studies were conducted with adults. With her teen-sized lungs, a long and storied history of library quiescence, and having grown up around two silent-sneezer parents, Connie knew that her average sneeze was much quieter, probably under forty decibels. That soft a noise could be easily lost behind the ambient sounds of nature, especially when covered up by four angry and deadly Gems who wouldn't stop arguing with each other about which one of them would carry more boxes.

But Connie didn't have an average sneeze anymore. Instead, her sneeze erupted as a hurricane gale that knocked her out of her crouch. The wind blast carved a divot out of the ridgeline they stood upon and turned the strawberry patch that hid them into a geyser of juicy pulp.

Dirt and strawberry gore sprayed over the little valley, drumming the side of the parked spaceship. It spattered across the stacks of crates and over the startled faces of the four Gems, who had turned in unison at the sound of the explosion to stare at the two spies revealed.

"Gesundheit," Garnet deadpanned, rising up from behind cover that no longer existed.

Connie could only gape at the wreckage of their hiding spot, and then down below at the four expressions of shock staring up at them. A small, niggling, overly rational part of Connie's mind wondered how the equal and opposite force of her sneeze hadn't blown her head clean off her shoulders. Then it wondered if Isaac Newton had ever encountered the Gems while devising his Laws of Motion, and how much of his hair he must have pulled out at their stark refusal to obey those laws.

As the sound of the sneeze echoed across the fields, a sweet miasma settled into the valley, tamping down the lingering scent of smoke and char. Of the enemy Gems, Flint broke from her shock first to throw an accusatory finger up toward the ridgeline. "ESPIONAGE!" she shrieked.

Garnet braced herself low, gauntlets clenched at the ready. "Run," she said. And only when the fusion shot forward at blinding speed did Connie realize that the word had been meant for her.

Connie knew exactly what the intent of the word had been. But she refused to let her friend face this alien invasion alone. She wouldn't be an innocent bystander or a victim. And besides which, one of those enemies had her sword, Steven's sword, Rose Quartz's sword. So she drew her saber and obeyed Garnet's command in the worst way she could, charging down the hill as she bellowed her fiercest war cry.

In the time it took Connie to run five long strides, Garnet had already become a living nightmare to the enemy. Her gauntlet crashed through Flint's nose before the Quartz had finished her outburst. The blow flipped Flint hair over heels into Milky, and the two Quartzes fell into a tangle of limbs.

Garnet spun through the punch into a kick aimed squarely into Pyrite's chest. The golden brawler staggered, but then puffed out her chest, and the motion threw Garnet across the valley floor. Which seemed to be Garnet's idea all along, as the stoic fusion bounded off of Pyrite and made for the open ramp of the rectangular spaceship.

"The ship!" Pyrite bellowed, realizing too late to grab the fusion.

As fast as Garnet was, she wasn't faster than Polarite's gesture. The skinny Gem lifted her arm, and her fingers twitched. A chirpy _bweep-bweep_ sound emerged from her arm and, in response, the ramp and door of the spaceship began to retract. Only a sliver of opening remained when Garnet slammed into the side of the ship. She jammed her armored fingertips inside to stop it from closing, and braced her whole body against the mechanism of the door, shaking with the effort. And the door, inch by agonizing inch, began to yield open once more.

Polarite lifted her sleeve to her mouth, and her arm _bweeped_ again. "Beryl, launch!"

A tinny reply filtered out of the arm. "What? But I still have pre-flight diagnostics, and the gravity drive—"

"If the ship is compromised, then we lose everything, you clod!" snarled Polarite. "Launch!"

The sophisticated new Gem looked ready to hurl even meaner invectives through the connection, but Connie had arrived. Leaping, Connie swept her saber down into Polarite's arm and felt the blade ring against something metallic and draw a hiss of static that ended the call. She swung again, forcing Polarite backwards, and the Gem tripped over her own feet and collapsed onto her back.

"Hostile fauna! Hostile fauna!" Polarite yelped. As she crawled backwards, the fingers of the arm Connie hadn't chopped all merged together, combining into a long, curved pair of tines. Polarite lifted the tines at Connie, and the air began to hum.

Connie's sword stopped mid-swing. She nearly split her face open on the blade as her momentum had her crashing into her own hilt. Before she could recover, she felt the saber jerking straight upward, and held onto the grip for dear life. Her saber lurched overhead with her hands attached, her toes scrabbling for purchase on the grass as she dangled from the hilt. No matter how she pulled or thrashed, the saber refused to budge from the invisible force that held it aloft.

Polarite kept the sword motionless with her tines—a giant alien horseshoe magnet of tremendous power and specificity, Connie realized too late. "Fascinating," Polarite murmured, stooping to examine Connie's fruitless struggle to reclaim her sword. "The Crystal Gems have domesticated some kind of anthropoid servitor. And they've even decorated it with a faux gemstone. How curious."

Arching her body backwards as she clung to the hanging saber, Connie gathered momentum, and then swung forward with all of her might, kicking her heels through Polarite's jaw. The Gem collapsed with a squawk, curling into a ball on the ground as she cradled her face. Connie's sword fell free of the invisible grasp, and she stumbled back to the ground with her weapon in hand.

The spaceship door creaked, giving another inch to Garnet's unyielding might. The fusion's gauntlets pressed fingerholds into the alloy, actually distending the hull while the whole ship shuddered as if straining to get underway. Yet the ship could not budge because Garnet would not budge.

Then Milky Quartz forced Garnet to budge anyway, wrapping her tremendous hand around Garnet's waist. With a yell and a twist, Milky hurled Garnet out of the ship's door and cratered her into the side of the valley's slope. Pyrite was already in motion, flying through the air to stomp her boots through Garnet's visor, but the fusion recovered too quickly, rolling out from under the blow…but away from the contested ship.

No longer stymied, the spaceship's door closed, and its seams melted back into the hull. The only memory of the door was the shape of Garnet's grip bent into the hull, marring its otherwise smooth, bland perfection. Evidently the door's closing was the last thing holding the ship back, for the instant the seam vanished, the ship leapt skyward faster than Connie's eyes could follow. There was no sound of gathering power in its thrusters, just a _whoosh_ of air rushing to fill the absence it left. It glimmered in the stratosphere for one instant, and then vanished in the next.

Connie rushed after Garnet, crying out in warning as Pyrite and Milky gave chase to the fusion. But a puff of intense heat raised the hairs on Connie's arms, and she threw herself to the ground in mid-stride. A stream of fire as thick as a telephone pole roared over her from behind, blazing through the space her head had occupied. The world became acrid heat, and she clawed at the ground to rise into a sprint, barely keeping hold of her saber as she escaped the flames.

Whirling around, Connie saw Flint snuff out the thick blast and begin gathering a new one. "You look better than you did at Ascension. Got your form all sorted out again, eh?" taunted the lanky Quartz.

Reacting faster than thought, Connie lifted her hands, reaching out with her half-hollow. She squeezed, and the air around Flint obeyed, dragging wisps of the Gem's fire as it condensed into a shimmering ball in front of Flint's chest. Just as quickly, Connie let go, and the ball exploded outward. Flint staggered back from the air grenade's detonation, and her own fiery blast went wide, blazing a nonsense line into the greenery far left of Connie.

Flint's haughty sneer melted into a scowl. "Why, you gusty little squidger!" she snarled, and blasted again.

Connie mashed another air grenade in front of Flint, and then another, and another. Every time Flint gathered a new stream of fire to hurl at her, Connie nudged the Gem with another node of pressurized air. Black spiral lines littered the ground to either side of Connie. The air shimmered with heat and pressure battling it out in the atmosphere. But Connie remained untouched, while Flint grew more irate with every wide miss.

"Alright, then! Blow this!" howled Flint. And she spun, drawing and flinging a black javelin from the gemstone at her shoulder in one smooth motion.

Her eyes prickling with sweat, Connie yelped and stumbled backwards at the sudden blur of motion. Something firm caught her heel, and she toppled, yelping, her air grenade missing its mark. As the ground rushed up to pound the breath out of her, she felt pain lance through her ribs.

Gasping, Connie clutched at her side. Her hands found the shaft of the javelin sticking crookedly in the air above her. As she ran her hands down, she felt sticky wet warmth spill through her fingers. She swiped at her eyes, feeling that same warmth smear across her face. When she could see her hands again, they were covered in red, dripping with stringy gore. The sounds of battle dimmed behind the furious beating of her heart as she pressed at her open wound in a panic, her chest heaving, her tongue lolling across her bottom lip.

She tasted strawberries.

With a second to think, and a deep breath, Connie realized that she had fallen backwards into a strawberry patch. The javelin was pinned into the ground beneath her with the edge of her shirt caught under its tip, which had grazed her ribs with a shallow scratch that she doubted was even really bleeding. Only the strawberries that had caught her had suffered, and they had exacted their vengeance by soaking through her jeans and her new V-neck shirt.

Stomping in fury and drawing a fresh javelin, Flint howled, "What does it take to land a hit on—"

Garnet leapt through Flint, the fusion's gauntlet hammering the Quartz through a line of her own charred strawberries. The quaking ground warned Garnet in time, and she turned to block Milky's enormous punch with crossed fists. Even blocked, the blow pushed Garnet back a dozen feet, the fusion's heels drawing twin lines into the dirt as she barely kept her footing. Then she sprang forward to answer Milky's punch in kind.

Connie rose when the javelin pinning her to the ground evaporated into motes. Her first impulse was to run to Garnet's aid, but Garnet seemed like more than a match for the huge Quartz. And besides which, she doubted her saber would do much to Milky anyway. Polarite had taken cover behind her stacks of crates to watch the battle, her half-hidden expression a mix of wonderment and fear.

Realization jolted through her, and Connie whipped her head around in searching. It took her two more seconds to find Pyrite, who had circled wide up the hill and now descended upon Connie with an almost casual stride. When the big Gem saw Connie spotting her, she grinned and reached under her cape to draw her manifesting double-headed axe.

Connie's hands tightened against the leather binding of her saber's hilt until her knuckles cracked. She felt herself scream, felt the sound of it tearing through her chest. Then she charged.

"Aren't you that Green Beryl from the landing pad?" Pyrite quipped. "You look different."

Steel flashed in Connie's hands, but it arced through empty air as Pyrite leaned back out of its reach. The Gem's axe swung in reply, a languid response that Connie could barely follow and only just ducked behind the protection of her saber, her arms quaking as the axe glanced off the blade. The blow knocked Connie back three full steps, her feet fumbling to stay underneath her. But she bellowed again, and attacked again. And again, her sword missed.

"You barely got away last time. I never thought you'd be the one looking for a rematch from me," Pyrite jeered. Her lazy axe caught Connie's sleeve on a near miss and tore it away, staggering Connie. It was all the invitation Pyrite needed to advance, swinging one-handed as she forced Connie backwards across the valley floor.

Sweat and strawberry juice spilled into Connie's eyes. She let herself believe they were the reason her eyes stung as she pushed back against Pyrite's taunts. Her arms trembled with the effort of deflecting the Gem's golden axe, and her breathing came in ragged snarls. But at last she saw her opening. She ducked the double blades, coiled, and pushed her whole body behind the hilt in one thrust, bellowing with every ounce of breath she could muster.

The saber stopped cold in Pyrite's grasp. The Gem had caught the thrust between her thumb and forefinger, pinching the flat of the blade. Connie's bellow choked into a whimper as she ran into her own pommel. Her hands remained locked around the grip on reflex as she fought to breathe again. Her weak twisting couldn't wrench the saber free of Pyrite's grasp.

Pyrite beamed at her as she struggled. "This one's new. Is it a local sword?"

The Gem's fingers twisted.

A flat thunderclap rang in Connie's ears. She staggered backwards, freed so suddenly that she ended up on the ground. Blinking, she stared at the stub of rough, craggy steel jutting out of the hilt clutched in her hands.

The rest of the blade remained in Pyrite's grasp, twirling between her fingers like a majorette's baton. "Oh, too bad. This one's no good. Your old sword was much better. I've been meaning to thank you for giving it to me." As she flicked the blade away, Pyrite leaned forward, putting the rose petal hilt behind her shoulder on clear display for her foe.

As she stared up at the Gem mocking her, something inside of her broke. The wall of her half-hollow swelled with the mockery of the smug brawler, and then cracked, spilling a sensation of cold lightning into Connie's chest and down her limbs. The hilt rolled out of Connie's limp hands, forgotten.

Connie reached up, gripping the air above her and pushing it back with a sharp sweep of her arms, throwing herself off of the ground with a fierce wind that billowed through her hair. The cold mountain morning obeyed her silent command, filling her hands as she cupped them at her waist. "Give me that sword!" she shrieked, and then threw her hands out at Pyrite.

A howl of wind leapt from Connie's palms to barrel through Pyrite. The cold air pushed against Connie, doubling and redoubling with every second she held the gale, but she pushed right back, gritting her teeth and planting her feet against her own funneled hurricane.

Pyrite's purple hair snapped straight back under the force of the gale. The big Gem lost a step, and had to press a hand to the side of her mirrored visor to keep it on her face. But that was all.

Quickly, the gale petered out, the force of the winds sapping every ounce of strength from Connie's arms. Connie wheezed and toppled forward, landing on her hands, her hair falling into her face. Every feeling she had stuffed into her half-hollow was gone, making it a true hollow once again. Empty, spent, she looked up through her sticky curtain of hair at Pyrite.

The Gem sighed, pushing her visor back up her nose. "I wanted this to be fun," Pyrite groused. "You were a lot spunkier back on the landing pad. What a disappointment." And she took up her axe, marching forward with renewed purpose in her gait.

Connie's body was spent. Her half-hollow ached emptily. But her teeth flashed in a snarl, and her trembling hands flew, throwing gusts of air that billowed over Pyrite without effect. "Give! Me! That! Sword!" She screamed with every blast. "Give! Me! Tha—"

The world suddenly glowed green. Connie saw her outstretched hands awash in the strange light, and Pyrite stopped in her tracks, startled by the light's emergence. Looking down, Connie gasped at the brilliance emerging from the stone beneath her throat. Then she lost her breath at the sight of a shape emerging from the stone, a shape composed of the purest green light she had ever seen.

She waited. The glow did not emerge further. It waited for her, Connie could tell. It needed her. No, that wasn't quite right. It knew that she needed it. So Connie reached up and grasped the glowing shape. It sent an electric jolt through her hand as she pulled it free of the stone, the glow fading as she swept the shape into fullness.

It was a sheet of green, metallic fabric, dangling from one corner in Connie's fist. The fabric twisted to the ground, where the rest of it pooled at Connie's feet. She recognized the material in an instant, remembering how Jade had shaped it into a sailcloth when the Gem had owned her body. In Connie's hands, it stubbornly remained a sheet.

"That's it?" Pyrite guffawed. She doubled over, clutching her midsection as she laughed herself hoarse. Her axe clattered to the ground. "Stop! You're gonna make me crack myself! Oh, my stars!" she heaved between laughs.

"Pyrite!" Polarite whinged from behind her crates. "Stop entertaining yourself and dispatch these rebels!"

"Sorry, thinker," Pyrite wheezed back, "I don't answer to you. I answer to Zir—"

Two rocketing gauntlets slammed into the cluster of stacked crates, which vanished into a blast of smoking debris. The shockwave threw Polarite across the valley floor to roll through a patch of strawberry char until she finally came to rest among the torn, blackened runners.

"My equipment!" Polarite wailed, gaping at the smoldering crater where her crates had stood.

Connie followed the gauntlets' contrails back to where Garnet stood poised and empty-armed. Dark bruises mottled the fusion's body, and the corner of her afro had been ripped away, but she still stood tall. Flint and Milky couldn't say the same, pulling themselves up out of the dirt where Garnet had evidently left them facedown.

Garnet paused only long enough to cover her gemstones in a new set of gauntlets before she rushed forward, a living blur that snatched Polarite off the ground by the collar of her long white coat.

"Tell us why you're on Earth," Garnet demanded, turning her gaze enough to let Pyrite know the words were meant for the golden Gem as well.

All of the mirth had flattened out of Pyrite's expression, leaving only her purified contempt. "How about this instead, doublet?" she said.

Faster than Connie could react, Pyrite slipped her boot under the tangle sailcloth in Connie's grasp and kicked it into the girl's face. Green fabric blinded her, and she felt something grasp the cloth by the corners and scoop her off the ground in a makeshift bindle. Connie scratched at the smooth metallic fabric but found no purchase to escape.

Through her fabric prison, she heard one word from Pyrite that filled Connie with instant dread. "Catch," the golden Gem said.

Impossible force mashed Connie into the weave of her own sailcloth. She felt herself spun like a centrifuge, whirled inside of the bindle, the blood fighting against tremendous G-force to reach her eyes and brain as the green world around her began to grow dark. Then the spinning stopped, and the force redirected her along a straight line, and she felt herself rushing into the unknown, blinded by the sheet pinned to her face by the force of the wind rushing past her.

Shaking her head, Connie managed to loose the sheet from her face, letting it rip past her and vanish into the howling wind surrounding her. When she finally saw where she was, her heart shrank, and her stomach dropped out of her, trailing a mile behind her: she was sailing through the air with the rolling fields spread below her for miles in every direction. Strawberries dotted the greenery like freckles, and the pyramid temple looked like a tiny model dropped and lost in someone's backyard.

Pyrite had flung her out of the sailcloth like a sling, throwing her higher and farther than Connie could have believed, and now she was arcing over the fields toward the inevitable end of her flight. She felt her own scream tearing at her throat, but she couldn't hear it for the wind rushing past her ears.

 _Too high, too high, too high!_ the primitive part of her brain screamed at her. Some more rational part kept her arms and legs wheeling until her tumbling slowed and she could push her face into the wind. She was unthinkably high, hilariously high, bodily at an altitude meant for airplanes and helicopters, not teenager, and she could feel gravity's pull correcting the mistake.

She tried to steady herself inside and out, steering what little she could with her limbs while she tried to take a deep breath. The wind didn't listen to her movements, and it pushed so hard that she could barely get any air into her lungs.

Really, given the force necessary to throw her to such heights and speeds, it was already a miracle that she hadn't broken her neck, or even just liquified in the sheet when she's been thrown.

 _Not helping, brain!_

Already the ground loomed closer. Something dark ran across the ground below her as if to keep up, and she realized she was watching her own shadow racing over the fields at unthinkable speed. She had seconds at best before she and the shadow collided.

" _Sail!"_ she screamed into her half-hollow. The thought echoed back at her. All of her misery had been spent in her useless blasts against Pyrite. No winds would listen to her, and Jade's gemstone remained dark.

Strawberries rushed below her in red streaks. The smell of lush green returned as the thin air became warmer and fuller. Her shadow rippled closer, closer.

"Jade!" The desperate sob came unbidden. She couldn't hear it, but she felt the name quake through her body with the power of her final word.

The earth rushed up to meet her. Connie screamed and closed her eyes.

Her dark world tumbled, her body jerking hard at her landing. She felt impact, and rolling, and heard leaves and vines tearing around her. The chaos rattled around her for three long, awful, endless seconds. Then it all stopped.

Connie was not splattered. Bruised, possibly cut and bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts, but definitely not splattered.

"You can open your eyes now."

The gentle coaxing made Connie crack an eyelid. She saw herself at the endpoint of a long, deep furrow in the ground, with shredded plants and strawberry pulp sprayed to either side. Garnet held her close, her arms and gauntlets still wrapped around Connie. The Gem had dirt and greenery staining her form, and half a strawberry had been lodged in her afro, filling in the corner that the Quartzes had ripped out.

Connie was amazed. The Gem had somehow managed to keep up and even catch her out of the air to cushion her landing. "Th-Thank you," Connie stammered as she rose out of Garnet's embrace on shaky legs.

Garnet's visor turned back to the direction they had come from, and she stood. As disheveled as she looked, she still seemed ready for more. "They'll be gone by the time we get back," she said, "but we should still check their landing site for any clues."

Connie opened her mouth to reply. Her trailing stomach finally caught up with her from the air, slamming into Connie and shooting up her throat. She fell to her knees and emptied her breakfast all over the ground. To no surprise, _It's Bran_ looked more or less the same post-stomach as it did in the bowl.

"We can take a minute first," Garnet said, and rubbed Connie's back while she heaved.


	15. Unfamiliar Familiar

Connie trudged on long shadows back toward the warp pad. The sun sat low behind them, turning the strawberry fields into a dark nest of stalks, berries, runners, and buried weapons for her leaden feet to catch on, which made the going even slower. But the Gems behind her didn't seem to mind the pace, barring one loud exception.

"Hey, watch those hands!" Amethyst yelped. Her masterful shapeshifting had created a flatbed wagon big enough to haul back the collected debris that remained of Polarite's equipment. At the rear of the belligerent purple wagon, Garnet and Pearl braced on the back slats to push Amethyst through the rough terrain.

The lithe pale Gem grunted as Amethyst's wheels pushed through another strawberry, slowing their progress with its delectable, agonized gushing. "We wouldn't have to push so hard if you made yourself wheels designed for off-road activity," Pearl huffed.

Amethyst's face, molded into the front of the wagon, twisted itself to look past her spoked wheels so she could glare at Pearl. "How about you be the wagon and I push instead?" she snapped.

The arguments had been coming more and more frequently as the day had waned, and the last of Connie's nerves strained to hold her frustrations silent. Shortly after Garnet has saved Connie from becoming strawberry fertilizer, the two had returned to the landing site to prove Garnet's predictions correct: none of Shard's forces had lingered, but they had left behind the remains of their destroyed cargo. And so, with a brief stop back at the house to rally some help, they proceeded to excavate any trace of Polarite's technology from the site, gathering anything that might give them a clue as to the Gems' whereabouts or machinations. Only scrap remained, but they hoped Peridot might still glean some insight from it.

Steven kept ahead of the wagon to clear as many strawberries as possible from the wagon's path. Connie was meant to be doing the same, but couldn't muster nearly as much energy as Steven had. Her body ached, and her hands were raw from the work, and every inch of her was either dirty, or sticky, or both.

"Almost there!" Steven called as he rolled another melon-sized berry out of the way. "And that's one more for the birds. Or bugs, maybe. Do birds eat strawberries? They eat bugs, so I guess it still works in the end."

With four people pushing, and a little wiggling from Amethyst, they heaved their living cart onto the warp pad. Connie felt tempted to crawl into the wagon just for a chance to sit, though remembering that the wagon was also her friend made her feel weird about the impulse. Fortunately, the semi-weightlessness of warp space pulled them into the sky, easing her full-body ache.

Gravity returned all too soon, bouncing Connie onto the arrival pad with a jolt. She blinked at the interior of the beach house, surprised that they hadn't traveled straight to the farm. "Did we forget something? I thought we were taking this stuff straight to Peridot," Connie said.

Pearl rested a hand on Connie's and Steven's backs to usher them off the pad. "We three are," she said primly. "You two need to eat something and rest. You've been working all day."

Any argument Connie wanted to make was drowned out by the rumble in her stomach. She'd snuck a _Protes_ bar when they'd first returned to the house, but had eaten nothing since. Looking back, she felt silly for not grabbing a handful of strawberry at any point in their excavation or the trip back. How much messier could it have made her to eat one tip-to-stem with her hands?

When Pearl's touch brushed the sheath at her back, however, Connie paused at the edge of the pad. She slung the sheath carefully overhead, keeping the hilt at the top. Once it was removed, though, she pulled the hilt out to show Pearl the broken sword. The rest of it rattled loosely in the sheath. "I'm sorry, ma'am," she said, offering the broken weapon to Pearl. "I should have taken better care of it."

"Goodness!" Pearl exclaimed. "Well, I'm just glad you didn't get hurt when it broke. We'll see about finding you a replacement when we get the chance." She smiled, but made no move to take the weapon from Connie.

"Should we come find you after we eat?" Steven asked.

Garnet shook her head. "After we're done at the farm, we'll be looking for signs of where the other Gems might have gone. They could have left traces for us to follow. You two should stay here."

Connie still lingered at the warp pad's edge, biting her lip. After a moment's hesitation, she stammered, "Garnet? I…I'm sorry I gave us away. We could have gotten killed because of me, and…"

"It's okay. You couldn't help it," Garnet told her. She glanced at Steven, and said, "Take care of each other."

The wagon's wheel stretched forward to nudge Connie off the pad. "Go on, already! I'm not exactly lugging feathers here," Amethyst complained. As Connie trudged back a step, the shifted Gem added, "Ooh, but don't finish all that leftover macaroni and motor oil I left in the fridge. I'm gonna be wheelie, wheelie hungry when I get back." Her spokes jiggled to punctuate the joke.

Pearl's eye-rolling groan followed the three Gems as they vanished back into warp space.

As the light faded and the chime of the pad rang silent, Connie sagged. A long sigh wilted her. She let her head fall to her chest, and the rounded edge of Jade's gemstone pressed coolly into her chin. The temple door across from the warp pad seemed to loom large before her, its five colorful gemstones dark and empty after the flash of the pad was gone.

Movement appeared at the edge of her vision, and she looked up to find Steven offering her a glass of water. He held a glass for himself as well, already half-empty. "It's not easy," he said apologetically, his smile a little sad, "being the one left behind. I get it."

The full glass of water vanished into Connie with one long gulp. "Thanks," she wheezed, fractionally quenched. "So, what now?"

"Now we eat and rest," Steven said. And he turned back to the kitchen to begin foraging in the refrigerator.

Her shoulders sagged a little more. "That's all? We're really not going to help?" she insisted.

His voice came back muffled from the interior of the fridge. "We did help. Now we have to take care of ourselves. Are you thinking sandwiches, or do you want to microwave something? I wouldn't recommend Amethyst's mac and oil. Her pasta always turns out crunchy."

Connie went to the sink and sucked down two more glasses of water. Halfway through another, she noticed the brown fingerprints mottling the sides of the glass. It took another two minutes of washing her hands before she saw the fresh, raw skin of her fingers again. The stark line of where her washing ended at the wrists made her cringe. "I, uh, think I'll take a shower first, if that's okay," she said.

"Sure," Steven called distractedly. He was playing smell-roulette with a host of different resealable containers he'd found at the back of the fridge, trying to decide what among them might still be edible.

Carefully so as to shed as little dirt as possible, Connie tiptoed to the living room and hauled out her footlocker. As she considered her wardrobe, her eyes drifted to the seascape out the window. Sunset had fallen across the strawberry battlefield half a world away, but there in Beach City, the sun still shone through a brilliant blue afternoon sky. She decided on a tank top and shorts since they wouldn't be leaving the beach for the rest of the day.

She was stacking the clothes together for her trip to the bathroom when Steven appeared at her side again, this time with a sandwich in hand. "Hey, what's that?" he asked through a spray of crumbs.

Connie yelped and stuffed the fresh underwear she'd collected from the locker in between her clean shirt and shorts to hide them. Then her horror tripled as Steven found, instead of underthings, a stack of facedown books in her locker. "Wait!" she cried.

But he had already picked up the top book from the stack, turning it over to read the cover. Connie only barely closed her eyes in time to keep herself from seeing it. " _Destiny's End_? Hey, I haven't seen this in a long time. And you brought the whole series? Awesome!" she heard him say.

"Put it back!" Connie snapped. She cringed at the edge in her tone, and even with her eyes closed, she could feel Steven doing the same. Trying to measure her voice more evenly, she said, "Put it back the way it was, cover-down. Please."

Only once she'd heard the knock and scrape of the faux-leather covers sliding together did she open her eyes, and found exactly the worried expression on Steven's face that she'd been dreading. Worse, he'd taken a full step back from the table. From her.

"Why did you bring your _Spirit Morph Saga_ books if you don't want to see them?" he asked. Then he blinked, and she could see him realizing the true question in front of him. "Wait, why did you bring any books? I thought you had already booked though everything in your house."

"Almost everything," she admitted. When she had told her parents that she had read all of their home's books, it hadn't been a lie. But once she had started booking everything she could, she instantly decided to leave aside her collector's edition of her favorite of all favorite books.

"But why?" insisted Steven, looking confused. "You could remember all of it forever. Lisa, Archimicarus…maybe some of the cake stuff isn't your favorite, but—"

"Because!" Connie snapped. Once more, they both recoiled at her voice's edge, and she covered her mouth until she could blunt her words a little. "Because I want to read them again, and I can't do that if I book them," she explained.

He hung his head sheepishly. "I'm sorry. I guess I don't understand," he admitted.

She struggled for some way to explain it to him. Finally, she asked, "What's two plus two?"

He answered immediately. "Four."

"How do you know?" she challenged him. "Did you do the math in your head? Did you count it out?"

A scoffing chuckle rolled through him. "Of course not. I just know what two plus two is. Is this some kind of school thing?"

"You just knew it," Connie emphasized. "The answer just came to you when you thought about it. That's what booking is like for me. When I read something I've already booked, my brain tries to feed me the entire thing with every time I look at the next word on the page. Over and over, until I'm so sick of it I can't even look at it anymore."

"…oh," Steven breathed.

She wrapped her arms around her stomach and risked a glance at the blank back cover of _Destiny's End_. "I reread _The Spirit Morph Saga_ every summer break. I used to never let myself read them any other time of the year, just so I could stay up late and go through as much of them at once as I could. The new ones used to come out at the end of the summer, so I'd always want to catch up, and even after the last one, I…" She sighed. "I was hoping I could get my booking power under control so I could actually read them again. Really read them, like I used to."

The _but_ in her voice was evident to both of them. She had already speed-binged a full season of _Camp Pining Hearts_ in just a few five-minute increments with no sign that her booking power could be stopped.

Connie sighed again and picked up her stack of clothes, making for the bathroom. "I'm going to go clean up," she muttered, hurrying through the door to avoid any further conversation.

She closed the door with her whole body, sagging onto it with her head thunking against the wood. A frustrated scream wheezed out of her in a long, long, silent sigh. Her whole body trembled with exhaustion, echoes of the adrenaline that had supercharged her body during the fight. She was embarrassed by her outburst at Steven, ashamed of how she had endangered herself and Garnet, furious at herself for not doing better or being better. It was too much for her to feel at once.

As the breath dwindled out of her, she let her glut of feelings drain into her empty half-hollow. She focused all of it into the void until her heart slowed and her spirit felt blissfully, emptily numb.

The pipes rattled, the showerhead hissed, and steam began to fill the room as Connie let the water run while she peeled herself out of her clothes. Muddy strawberry juice had staked its claim on her, taking its tithing of skin and hair with it as she worked the crusty fabric. Her clothes fell to rest in a pile on the floor, unsalvageable.

Dazedly, she stared at the mirror. The shower had conjured a thick layer of fog over her reflection, but she could still see herself underneath it, still intact, framed with a black halo of hair. And there at her center sat that tiny green speck.

" _You were a lot spunkier back on the landing pad. What a disappointment."_

Her whole body clenched at the memory of Pyrite's taunt. Eyes, fists, teeth, she tightened until her whole body shook. The black halo surrounding her reflection began to ripple, and she felt the steam in the room whirling around her body. Before she could erupt, she tore sightlessly into the shower and yanked the curtain shut, letting the water pound against her.

Connie scrubbed her skin almost to the bone. The strawberry muck sluiced off of her into a muddy pink swirl at the drain. She dragged shampoo through her long sheaf of hair until her scalp ached. The pain of her rough care trickled into her half-hollow, making it burn bright.

She gathered all of her sad feelings and stuffed them into the bottom of the half-hollow, crushing them to make room for something new. She was sick of feeling sad. Those feelings had wasted their chance to make Jade's gemstone work. Now she would give anger a try instead.

She would train harder. She would master Jade's powers, live up to the responsibility that Jade had entrusted to her. She would protect the Earth and become worthy of Jade's gemstone.

And she would wipe that smug grin off of Pyrite's face while she did all of it.

When she emerged from the shower, the whole bathroom was thick with steam, and the mirror was a solid gray wall. Only a hint of green color pierced the haze. But as Connie watched, it shone brighter. She looked down and found the stone aglow with a corner of Jade's sailcloth emerging from its surface.

It resisted her this time. She had to pull harder than she did before in the heat of battle. But finally the whole sailcloth emerged, fluttering in her hand as she held it up before her. "You're not what I need, but you're a start," she harrumphed to the cloth, savoring the little snarl she could feel gathering in her half-hollow and she fed it her angry dissatisfaction. Then, out of curiosity, she patted at her armpit with the cloth. "Huh. You're not very absorbent, either," she noted, and let the cloth evaporate into motes.

In short order, Connie marched out of the bathroom with fire in her belly, wet hair flopping at her back, and a thick cord of anger winding in and out of her half-hollow. Exhaustion would have to wait: she would tape up her broken saber, or find some old broom handle or other stand-in, and she would train until she dropped. Then she would pick herself up and train more. And if her body hurt, she would wring that pain for every last drop and feed it to her half-hollow.

But her determined march stopped short at the sound of a ukulele on the porch. Some nameless tune wandered the instrument's strings, the kind of song that went nowhere in particular and savored the journey in getting there. She started for the door, curious of the music, but stopped again when she saw a plate on the coffee table.

The smell of tuna salad pulled her closer, and she saw two sandwiches waiting on the plate. Her half-hollow growled, reminding her of all that righteous motivation she had been feeding it so it could feed her in kind. But her stomach growled louder, reminding her of the breakfast she'd lost and the _Protes_ bar it had already burned through hours ago.

Her indecision must have been heard outside, because the ukulele music paused briefly. "Come outside when you're done eating. You can make yourself something else if you don't want tuna, or if you want more," Steven called unseen, his voice cheerily drifting through the screen door. Then the music started again, content to pick up where it left off on its trip to nowhere.

Connie considered herself extremely restrained in that she had only finished one of the sandwiches by the time he had finished speaking. The second sandwich didn't last much longer than the first, giving her only seconds to be curious about his invitation before she heeded his instructions and pushed through the door to the patio.

In lieu of the patio furniture, Steven had chosen to sit on the decking with his back to the house, his legs crossed and his ukulele in his lap. He rested atop a square white cushion, with an identical cushion positioned in front of him, both of the squares having been taken from the couch for his purposes. When the screen door creaked, he opened his eyes and smiled at Connie. "You look a million times better," he said, and quickly added, "Um, not that you looked bad before. You just look like you're feeling better."

Connie could feel the warmth spreading in her cheeks. She tried holding onto that anger, keeping the flow moving in and out of her half-hollow. "What is all of this?" she asked. Then she saw the object sitting on the cushion beside him, and her stomach clenched. "Why do you have that?"

He patted the object beside him, a faux-leather-bound book sitting facedown on the deck. Even with its spine tucked against Steven's leg, Connie recognized the color and shape and knew it immediately: _The Unfamiliar Familiar_ , the first book in _The Spirit Morph Saga_. "I hope you don't mind that I grabbed this."

She minded quite a lot, and kept her eyes pointed skyward rather than risk booking any part of the volume. "Steven, I told you what happens if I read that," she snapped. Why, after everything she had tried to explain to him, did he think she would want to read? And why now, when the world was in more danger than ever, when Pyrite and the rest of Shard's cronies were out there, plotting and scheming and skulking?

His tone remained pleasantly cool in spite of the heat in her words. "You're not going to read anything," he promised her. "And if you want to leave, you totally can. That's okay too. But I think I know how you can keep your summer tradition going."

"How? Are you going to turn off my brain? I'm not sure if Peridot still has that gadget anymore," she said, not proud of how snidely she sounded, but not altogether unhappy about it either. "Steven, I can't—"

"Do you remember what I said yesterday?" he interrupted her gently. His hand was still poised on the book, but he made no move to lift it. "When I got back from my dad's, before dinner. Do you remember exactly what I said, word for word?"

Frustrated, she gave her memory a halfhearted skim. "I don't know. Something about how your dad tricked you into licking one of the car wash brushes?" she said. It had been funny at the time, but she had no patience for reminiscing, especially about something that had just happened a day ago.

He grinned. "Exactly. When someone just talks to you, you don't automatically book it, right? You have to be reading, or watching. Focused. But if you're relaxed, just talking or listening to someone, you don't book what you say or hear." He patted the book again, and declared, "Well, if you can't read your book yourself, then all you need is someone to read it for you."

She let her gaze drop back to him, surprised. Then she hardened her face, and said, "Steven, we don't have time for this. We should be training. Or strategizing. Or, or…something! We can't just do nothing."

"We're not doing nothing," he said, his smile unfaltering. "We're taking care of each other."

"Steven!" she fumed, feeling her cheeks puff. "Do you remember what Pyrite did to us at the landing pad? She just did it again, but worse! She tossed me like I was nothing. If it happens again, we could die. You could die! I won't let that happen."

A hint of discontent creased his brow. "'We' won't let that happen," he said. Then his brow smoothed and his smile blossomed in full once more. "But part of training is resting. We won't be ready if we're tired and frazzled."

"I'm not frazzled," she shot back, folding her arms.

"You're frazzled," he informed her. "On a scale of One to Frazzled, you're at about an eleven. Maybe even a twelve."

"I…" The anger in her half-hollow pushed its threads deeper into her, demanding that she change into her training outfit and find a sword. But the sandwiches in her stomach felt pleasantly heavy, splitting her resolve down the middle between comfort and motivation. Steven, with his book and his cushion, threatened to be the tipping point. "But…"

"I'm your coach, right?" he reminded her. "And I'm with you on this adventure every step of the way. But it's a marathon, Connie, not a sprint."

Her anger put up a magnificent fight. It tingled all the way down to her fingertips, demanding a weapon. It put jitters in her legs and down her spine. In the end, though, it could do nothing against the power of Steven's smile. So it retracted its tendrils into its half-hollow nest, rumbling, but asleep.

Connie knelt at the edge of the empty cushion. "Okay," she sighed.

He grinned. "Okay," he echoed. "Now, lie down."

She did so, awkwardly sidling her wet hair. Her scalp rested next to his crossed ankles, and she watched his grin widen upside-down. "What now?" she asked.

"Now you close your eyes and do nothing," he said. "If you do start booking, tell me right away and we'll stop. But otherwise, if I do the reading for you, we both get to enjoy the book again. Win-win."

She couldn't help but smirk up at him. "Nobody's read to me since I was four," she admitted.

"Then you're way overdue," he said, beaming. "Are you comfy?"

She shifted on the cushion. "Pretty comfy. If I had known what you were planning, I would have grabbed my pillow," she said.

His brows dropped. "Oh." As he considered her head, his cheeks reddened. "If you want, you could… Um, never mind. I'll go get you a pillow."

Reaching up, she touched his knee to keep him from rising. "What were you going to say?"

His blush spread up to the tips of his ears. "I was going to say that you could use me. My legs, I mean," he admitted, looking away. "I wasn't thinking. It's fine if—"

"My hair's wet," Connie blurted. Steven's blush was truly amazing, because it had somehow spread all the way to Connie's face too. She could feel the heat pouring through her cheeks. "I wouldn't want to get you all soggy. That's all. I mean, if you…"

She could hear him swallow hard. "I don't mind," he mumbled.

As hard as her heart had pounded back in the clutches of her anger, or out of fear as she'd sailed over the battlefield, it seemed to Connie as though her chest might explode as she scooted herself up the cushion to lay her head in Steven's lap. She could feel his muscles shifting to accommodate her. The warmth of him blazed through his jeans, warming her damp hair instantly.

"Good?" he said.

"Mm-hmm," she hummed, not trusting her voice while her insides fluttered.

"Good," he squeaked. Then he cleared his throat and instructed, "Now, close your eyes."

When she did, she heard him shuffling things around. Ukulele music began to play once more, this time tinnily from a source next to them. His phone, she realized. The sound of rifling pages sent a little thrill through her body, and she couldn't help smiling.

"Chapter One: The Morning Thief," he began in a resonant tone, speaking just a little slower than he normally would. "Lisa awoke with a start, the echoes of her dreams still dancing in her mind. The low rumble of thunder murmured through the quiet house."

The words Steven spoke felt familiar, but not with the certainty that came from her booking power. They were familiar, yet delightfully unfamiliar, changed in the cadence of Steven's voice and his choice of emphasis for the way he read each sentence. Pillowed in his touch, she let her favorite story wash over her, feeling half of herself sink into contentment.

Her anger nestled in the other half, in the seething half-hollow where it now took root to grow and seethe out of sight. Today it would lay at rest. But tomorrow? Tomorrow, and many days after, would belong to the anger.


	16. Tempest Rain

White foam kissed the bottoms of her feet as Connie raced onto the surf. She ran under a sky of stars, a black canvas so filled with points of brilliance that it shone like daylight. Every wave from the shore to the dark horizon glinted, roiling out of nothing to brush across the sand. And in their grasp, a thousand different treasures rose and fell, peering out from the water, just waiting for her, bobbing for her attention.

The seascape and its perpetual night felt like a second home to Connie now. It took several tries, and a lot of insomnia, but she had finally slept her way back to the dream beach that she and Jade had created together. Just like she'd hoped, the book she had pulled out of the dream ocean had remained on the sand, waiting for her, with its innumerable sister volumes still in the water, waiting to be saved.

Connie scooped another book out of the water and tucked it with the others under her arm. She could rescue entire stacks of books with each trip now, again and again, until the pile of books became the beacon on the shore that guided her back to where she started. The night air hung cool and still over the ocean, but her running swept a breeze through her hair, urging her forward, exhilarating her. Every time she ran up the crest of a wave and felt her toes leave the white foam edge at the top, she reveled in the feeling, as though she were flying above the ocean, her legs wheeling in empty air, her beaming face glistening in the sea spray.

As she pattered back onto the sand, she lifted her stack, pushing all of the books to the top of the pile save for one. With every stack, she held back one of the rescued books to examine it, trying to decode whatever it was trying to tell her. She knelt before a half-circle of the open books on the sand and added the new book into the array. Holding her breath, she opened the book, pressing both covers into the sand to splay the pages.

Gibberish. Like the others. Some of the books featured pictograms she couldn't decode with no text to explain them. Other books had nothing but text, random letters in lines that ran lengthwise and crosswise and sometimes spilled over each other in ways that made their nonsense illegible. Still other books were filled with glyphs the likes of which Connie had never seen, and could only recognize them as a language based on how they were arranged. This latest book depicted a circle on each page. The same perfect circle, over and over, for no reason Connie could decipher.

She groaned, tilting her face in her hands. One of these books had to have an answer for her. They were from Jade. Or, somehow, they were meant for Jade. Either way it made them Connie's responsibility.

Lifting her gaze to the ocean, she wiped the frustration from her eyes and scowled. Hundreds of books still bobbed in the water, waiting for her rescue. One of them would have the key to understanding this mystery. She knew it. She had to believe it. And until she had tried every single one of them, she would keep trying.

When she reached for another book, she felt sand rasping where she touched the page. Connie grimaced and tried to brush her hands clean on her shorts. The books seemed impervious to sand, water, tearing, or any other kind of damage, but trying to read them on the beach was getting messy. She wished she had some surface on which she could organize her studies, like a table, but she was afraid if she left the beach to find something, she might not be able to find her way back before the dream ended.

Something green teased the corner of her eye. She turned, thinking she had misplaced one of the books, and then froze in surprise as she found a perfect square of fabric spread out over the sand behind her. It was Jade's sailcloth, smooth and soft and metallic. A perfect option sans furniture. Too close to be anything but meant for her.

Had she created it in the dream? Had someone else created it for her?

Determinedly, Connie gathered her books one by one onto the sailcloth, ready to double her efforts. The last book lay just out of reach, forcing her to crawl for it.

"Connie?" the last book said. Its cover flapped as it spoke, its pages bending around the sound of her name.

She yelped in surprise and scrambled backwards on all fours, waiting with wide eyes to see what the book did next. Of all the things she had tried, she'd never thought to simply ask the books for answers.

The book hopped forward on the sand, using its bottom cover to jump. "Connie? Are you awake?" it said.

Her eyes widened as she recognized the voice. She leapt forward to pile her hands onto the book's cover and pin it silent, but it suddenly seemed too far away to reach.

"Wake up, sleepyhead!" the book teased.

* * *

Connie gasped, jerking awake in the confines of her blanket nest. Her cot clattered back onto all four legs as she flopped backwards, groaning softly. When she rubbed her eyes clear, she saw Steven behind her cot, already dressed for the day. His smile shone brighter than the morning glare coming from the window.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," he teased her again.

"Whuhtymizit?" Connie mumbled.

"Almost nine o'clock," he said, stepping back from the cot. Even through her blurry eyes, she could see that he looked worried.

Hurriedly, Connie wiped the grumblings out of her face and plastered a smile over it instead. "Good morning!" she chirped. "Sorry I slept so long. Thanks for waking me up."

"That's okay. You must have really needed it after yesterday," he said.

Connie bit back her reaction, feeding it into her half-hollow. Her smile widened, and she said, "I guess I can skip my run for one day."

He practically bounced, as though he could fish her out of her bed with nothing but his smile. "Well, don't skip on breakfast. I had an amazing idea for what to do today. You're going to love it!" Flouncing back toward the kitchen, he paused just long enough to add, "And if you get cold again, we can find you more blankets."

"Cold?" Connie said. The summer heat would have been too much to bear at night without the beach house's ocean breeze. The last thing she needed was another blanket. "Why would you think I was…"

She looked down into her lap. Jade's sailcloth had manifested over her while she'd slept. Even bigger than last time, this sailcloth reached the floor with each of its corners. Its edge bunched in her fist as she pulled it down her legs, frowning at the unwanted blanket.

"You can lounge in bed if you want," Steven called in a singsong voice, already pouring her morning bowl of _It's Bran_ , "but I promise you won't want to. Because today's the day we get you a new sword!"

The words broke her façade for a genuine smile this time. A halo of motes surrounded her as the sailcloth evaporated, dismissed. "A new sword? Really?" she asked, rolling out of her cot to chase after him. "How?"

* * *

"I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner. This will be great!" Steven exclaimed as he slid off Lion.

Connie sidled down Lion's flank after Steven, and her hiking boots splashed into the tepid waters covering the cavern floor. A light chill nipped at the air, but she had prepared with long sleeves and long pants, the bottoms of which grew instantly soggy. She was beyond noticing such paltry corporeal inconveniences, however, as she stood once more inside a piece of history.

As Lion padded to find a dry outcropping fit for napping, Steven led her the enormous circular platform of metallic crystal at the center of the cavern, the home of the secret Armory of Rose Quartz. The platform cast gentle illumination throughout the cavern, powered by some inexhaustible ancient technology housed within it, which banished any shadows underfoot and cast them instead against the far stone walls and the jagged ceilings high above. As she followed, she heard their footfalls echoing in the caves and tunnels far beyond, playing in the caves and tunnels that lived beyond the edge of the light.

"You're sure this is okay?" she asked him for the tenth time. Being back in this place felt wrong to her, more now than it had the first time Lion had brought them here. Back then, this had been just another piece of Steven's magical life, another thing that separated him from her mundane life. But even since becoming part of the Crystal Gems' world, since becoming a steward of a gemstone herself, Connie still balked at entering any of Rose's spaces. This wasn't the temple, or the Sky Arena, or the strawberry battlefield. This was a place Rose had left specifically for Steven.

Steven, though, didn't share Connie's reverence as he practically danced up to the control pillar rising out of the center of the Armory. "Nine thousand and one percent," he chirped. "You need another sword. And this is the best place on the planet for swords. I think. I guess I've never really gone looking for swords before. But until Lonely Blade opens an Itsy store online, we'll try here."

Connie giggled, stuffing her uncertainty into her half-hollow where it belonged. If Steven was excited, she could act the part in kind. It wouldn't take much acting, either: she did need a weapon, and his excitement was infectious.

Slapping his hand atop the control pillar's stenciled hand, Steven leaned suavely and waggled his eyebrows. Welcome back to _L'Boutique Univers_ , mademoiselle. Always happy to see such a distinguished shopper returning to us. Your wardrobe already looks _très chic_ , so may I assume you're here for an accessory?"

She bit her lip to hold in her laugh. "Did you practice that?" she choked.

"A little, in my head," admitted Steven. "Did it sound cool?"

"Nine thousand and one percent cool," she said.

"Awesome. Now," he said, and concentrated on his resting hand. His nose wiggled, and his weight shifted from foot to foot. "I think I can do this without any poking this time, but keep your fingers ready just in case. Wait… Wait… Aha!"

The disc underfoot rumbled, and pieces of the Armory's patterned surface rose upward. Clusters of weaponry floated beneath the rising platforms, spreading out into a full score of spears of different lengths, sizes, sculpts, and materials, lining themselves in the air for the teens' inspection.

"Spears?" Connie said, tilting her head. "Not swords?"

"The Spears of Pointy-ness!" Steven exclaimed in hushed awe. When Connie shot him a questioning look, he shrugged. "When Pearl brought me back here, she had important-sounding names for everything. We didn't get to these, though, so I'm making up my own." With a little effort, he tugged his hand free and glared at the control panel. "Also, this thing doesn't have a menu or anything, so it might take me a few tries."

His mild irritation fed her worry, and she hurried to stuff it into her half-hollow. Widening her smile, Connie said, "Well, hey, we can still check them out. We could find something really cool. Or maybe this is a chance for me to broaden my horizons."

Her show of enthusiasm brightened his face at once. "Yeah? Okay!" And he took her hand, leading her excitedly to the spears.

Connie's hand ghosted along the row of spears. One glittered like night, black alloy with flecks of something bright inside. The next looked like it came from a far-flung future in spite of being ancient, all clean lines and chrome so polished that Connie could see her warped reflection in it. Yet another spear looked like crystalized fire, a deep scarlet color formed into a smooth shaft and long, needle-fine point.

She reached for the red spear, but hesitated, shooting Steven a questioning look. At his excited nod, she braced herself with a deep breath, then pulled the spear out of the air. It weighed almost nothing, becoming a whorl of color around her as she spun it to gauge its feel. Her feet snapped instantly into a stance, and she swung the weapon through a brief kata. The spear tip cut deadly lines into the air around her.

But when she finished, she shook her head. "It's a great spear," she said. "They all are. But spears are already Pearl's thing. If I pick one too, my fighting style might take too much from hers. I don't think that's right." She lifted the spear back into line, uncertain if the Armory would know to take it back. But the spear seemed to know its home, and hung in the air when she finally let go.

"No problem," Steven assured her, leading her back to the control pillar. "We've got lots of stuff left to try." He slapped the panel, and the nineteen spears receded back under their panel, which sealed back into the floor.

A dozen new panels arose with a grunt of mental effort from Steven. And beneath the rising panels hovered a dozen different war hammers that gleamed in the light of the Armory. Some long, some short, each hammer featured a different and ornate head at its end.

"It's the Hammers of H-hhh… Of Hhh-umm… Hurtfulness!" Steven exclaimed.

Connie approached the nearest hammer, a tall beast of a thing whose head stood well above hers. Its strike plate had been hewn from translucent pink crystal and cut into a shallow point, capable of puncturing and smashing all at once. A pattern of prickly vines ran down the length of the haft, culminating in a blooming rose pommel at the very bottom.

When she tried to lift the hammer, the weapon refused to budge from its levitating perch. Undeterred, she grasped the cold metal even harder and closed her eyes. "You got this," she murmured to herself. "You got this."

She repeated the phrase like a mantra, taking it inside herself as her lips fell still. Releasing a slow breath, she cracked the seal on her half-hollow, freeing a piece of the snarl within. The melancholy, the self-recrimination, and all of the dark thoughts she had packed into the empty space had been heavy and slow by itself. But now that she had fed her anger into it as well, the snarl moved like lightning. It leapt out of the opening she made, super-charged by her own fury, and it was all she could do to channel the feeling through her limbs.

 _You got this!_ With that last silent cheer, Connie felt the hammer budge from its perch, hefted by Jade-powered strength. She staggered backwards with the rose hammer in hand, lifting its crystal head. It still felt heavy, but only _I-shouldn't-be-swinging-this heavy_ instead of _lifting-this-will-kill-me_ heavy.

Her one wobbly practice swing made her extra-sure, and she hurried to lift the hammer back under its panel. The burst of strength she'd fed herself from her half-hollow began to wane, and her arms trembled with the effort. Steven rushed to her side and, together, they put the hammer back in its place.

"It'd probably take me too long to grow into one of these," she admitted.

"Okay, but if the next thing we pull up is a bunch of giant nails, you might be sorry," Steven joked. Then he looked to her again, his head tilting in confusion. "Um, what's going on with your shirt?"

Connie looked down and jerked in surprise as she saw the front of her sweater stretching around something big and lumpy. Reaching up from the bottom, she felt a mass of fabric, and yanked it out from under the knit garment. A rumpled green sailcloth poured out, dangling in her fist.

"Whoa!" Steven exclaimed, staring agog at the sailcloth. "I know you said it came out when you and Garnet were fighting those other Gems. Does it do that on its own now?"

Grimacing, Connie smoothed the front of her sweater, trying to stuff her annoyance into her half-hollow before Steven could see it. She spared a fragment of irritation for the sailcloth, which vanished into motes in reply. "Apparently?" she said.

"Lucky!" Steven said. "It took me forever to get Mom's shield to come out when I wanted it. Your sheet can't wait to help you."

"Yeah," Connie said, pasting a grin across her face. "Lucky. Should we keep going?"

Steven returned to the panel, and the eleven hammers lowered back into the Armory. His eyes screwed shut with effort, lost in the search for something new in the collection. For a moment, Connie thought she heard the machinery rumbling. But the sound echoing off the walls actually came from Lion, who lay on his stone perch with his ears perked and a dissatisfied growl rolling through him.

They didn't have time to wonder at the grumpy cat, however, as a new array lifted out of the Armory. "Hey, speaking of shields," Steven said, "it looks like we found the Sturdy Shields of Sss…Safety. Man, this is harder than Pearl made it look."

A half-dozen shields floated up from within the Armory, their faces pointed inward to present themselves to the teens at the control pillar. Connie turned in a circle to examine the meager selection. The simplest of the shields was a petrified wooden disc lashed within an iron boss. The shield had a lovely rose icon painted on it, but she guessed that the thing had been kept for sentimental reasons rather than as part of the Armory proper. As she looked to the other shields—a tower shield with rose-patterned riveting, and a square infantry shield painted pink and white, and a medieval shield lined with white fur and depicting a purple sloth—she guessed that these were all mementos.

It made sense for the shields to be more trinkets than hardware. Of all the weapons Rose might need, a shield would never be one of them. But seeing the personal bits of history floating before her gave new life to that outsider feeling she had tried to suppress. She was perusing a memory left for Steven, and it would never feel quite right. She would never really belong in the Armory.

"Hey!" Steven's call made her stuff the feeling into her half-hollow. She turned to greet his shout with a smile, and found him with his arm around another of the shields. "This one must be sad. It's a teardrop!"

She approached the shield with an appraising eye. Made from clean iron, the shield featured a rounded top that tapered at the bottom into a sharp point. Rose petals had been etched into the surface of the curved top of its construction. "That's a kite shield," she explained, not needing her booking power for medieval battle trivia. "Armorers made them longer at the bottom to protect a mounted knight's leg."

He ran his hand down its shape appreciatively, but then jerked back with a tiny, "Ow!" A cut oozed on his fingertip. "The bottom is sharp," he complained, and popped the cut into his mouth.

Connie tested the bottom of the kite shield and was surprised to find an edge honed into the ironwork. Past the circular top, the rest of the shield was razor sharp. Circling, she inspected the back of the shield and found extra bracing down the shield's length. "This looks like it was modified to be a weapon and a shield," she marveled aloud.

"Attack and defense? Best of both worlds!" Steven said, his finger healed as it slipped from his mouth. "What do you think?"

She started to reach for the shield's handle, but then stopped. "Shields are your thing, Steven."

He looked crestfallen, insisting, "I wouldn't mind."

"But I would." She dialed up the intensity of her smile. "Just like with Pearl and her spear, remember? I need something that's mine."

"That makes sense," he admitted. Together, they returned to the control pillar. The five shields descended back into their housing, sealed away.

Across the cave, Lion lifted his head and sent a yowl at the Armory that echoed across the walls.

"Somebody's grouchy," Steven remarked. But his excitement returned as the next batch of weapons lifted out of the Armory to hover before them. "Ooh! The Axes of Ages! That one's easy, though, since Pearl already named them."

Connie looked at the ten axes floating before them. All of them were giant, two-handed monstrosities, with reach and sharpness to spare. The double-headed axe caught her eye immediately. She couldn't help but think of a similar axe, one that Pyrite had used to humiliate her.

Her anger built faster than she could ferry it into her half-hollow. "Definitely not," she said, folding her arms.

"How do you know unless you try it?" Steven goaded her. But then he looked twice, and the playfulness fell out of his voice. "Hey, are you okay?"

Once started, the memories would not relent. She remembered Pyrite's smirk from when the showy soldier Gem had packed her in Jade's sailcloth, and the ease with which Pyrite had tossed her across the entire battlefield. It had been all Connie could do to keep that two-headed axe from cleaving her down the middle.

She breathed deeply, wringing her anger out of the memories and stuffing it into her half-hollow. _Don't make Steven worry,_ she scolded herself. _You got this. You got this._

"I'm okay," she said aloud, forcing a smile.

"Your gemstone…" he said.

"Jade's gemstone," she corrected him automatically. Then she looked down, irritated, and saw the front of her sweater swelling again. Huffing, she dragged another sailcloth out from under her clothes and shook it into motes.

Steven looked unconvinced, but he thankfully didn't press the issue. Instead, he returned to the panel, and they watched the nine axes return to storage.

As Connie watched him concentrate on the panel once more, she felt something furry slide under her dangling hand. Lion had abandoned his napping spot to slink under her touch, collecting the attention that was his due as he rubbed himself along her side with his nose up in the air. She chuckled softly as she scritched his flank. "Are we being too noisy, Lion?" she cooed.

"That would be a first. I've seen him sleep through one of Sour Cream's sets. Ditto a bunch of big life-or-death Gem fights," Steven said. He tapped his pinkie on the panel, and then cried in success. "I think I got it!"

A circular column rose opposite them at the far end of the Armory, and then reticulated open to unleash a cloud of swords. Reverently, Connie approached, her eyes wide and heart pounding.

Her innards tightened as she stepped among the blades. The first time she had seen them so long ago, in the distant past of the year before, she'd been impressed beyond words. What fan of action-oriented fantasy wouldn't love the idea of stumbling across a magical arsenal? But with the benefit of Pearl's training she could now see the expertise in the blades, and it took her breath away.

Her training sabers had quality to spare, no doubt. But these blades had personality. They had panache!

Her fingers brushed against an old cutlass in a tattered leather scabbard. The thick grip had been wrought with a brass skull and crossbones, and had two pink stones filling the little skull's eye sockets. It moved with her touch before drifting back into position, and as it bobbed she admired the heft of its design. Cutlasses were blunt instruments made for hacking through bone. But bones weren't an issue in a Gem fight—at least none except her own, and maybe Steven's—and anyway, hacking and slashing didn't fit with her style.

Next she came across a beautiful daishō. The pair of blades floated independent of their sheathes, revealing the water pattern of their folded steel ripple in the Armory's light. The longer katana tapered into a graceful point with more than enough reach to make a foe think twice about stepping too close. And the wakizashi had a longer grip than normal, ready for a two-handed grip if fighting grew too close and personal, or if its wielder were perhaps not an eight-foot Quartz. The blades' grips were woven from the same black fabric interlaced with pink thread that, were the blades worn together, would form a rosebud pattern.

The swords were works of deadly art that demanded the highest precision to use. If anything, they would be too precise: folded steel possessed remarkable strength, but also brittleness. One wrong move could shatter either blade, which would never work for the rough, chaotic kind of fighting that Gem combat entailed. She admired the swords, but she knew she couldn't use them.

But then…

Connie lost her breath all over again to the beautiful specimen floating before her. Crafted from steel so blue that it looked like a slice of morning sky, the enigma before her defied any definition Connie tried to put to it. It wasn't a claymore, nor a broadsword, nor a feder, but it nonetheless possessed elements of each of those swords and more: it boasted a double-edge blade fitted into an inverted V-shaped crossguard that would be ideal for deflection and counterattack, seemingly built with fencing in mind, but its blade was too broad for traditional riposting, and its rose blossom pommel and thick profile boasted plenty of mass for heavy swings.

She had loved Rose's sword. But that hulking weapon had been made for Rose, a massive Quartz with strength to match her size, which made it a challenge to which Connie had been forced to rise. The sword before her was no challenge, but instead a glove that had waited thousands of years for her to find it and discover its perfect fit.

"Whoa!" Steven whispered, slinking around the opposite side of the sword. "Tempest Rain!"

"It has a name?" Connie exclaimed in a hush.

"Well, probably not," admitted Steven. "But, I mean, just look at it. Don't you think…?"

Her mind had already locked the name to the sword. "You're getting really good at the naming thing," she whispered distractedly. Slowly she reached up, her skin thrumming as it drew closer to the white wrapping at the hilt. Her fingertips brushed the tight fibers.

" _Your old sword was much better. I've been meaning to thank you for giving it to me."_

Connie jerked her hand back from Tempest Rain like it had been burned as Pyrite's taunt rang in her ears.

"What is it?" Steven asked, leaning around the sword to look at her hand. "Is it magic? Is it like an Excalibur thing? Do we have to find a one true king of England?"

"No. I mean, I don't know. It's not that," Connie said. She rubbed her hand up and down her sleeve, unable to meet Steven's worried gaze. The anger and frustration spilled through her faster than she could pack it into her half-hollow. "Steven, this is your mom's."

Steven became perfectly still, the concern blanking out of his features. "I know," he said. "So?"

Connie cringed, wishing she hadn't said anything. "I already lost her sword. 'The' sword. Lion brought you that sword, remember?" she said, and gestured to the big cat, who had his gaze turned imperiously to the ceiling. "This things she left behind is important. It's too important to let me just… I don't want to be the reason you lose something you can't replace. Again."

He didn't answer for several moments, watching her from the other side of Tempest Rain. As the silence piled atop her, lashed across her shoulders like a colossal weight, Connie started to turn away. But she stopped when Steven grasped Tempest Rain and pushed it toward her, offering her its hilt.

"I'm never going to run out of things that mom left me," Steven told her solemnly. "It's in everything I have, and everyone still around, like my Dad, and the Gems. It's everything she left unfinished, all the things that everyone wants me to be or do because she's gone. But this? This is just stuff. And right now, it can help someone I really care about. Someone I could never replace, even if I managed to find a hundred true kings of England."

Connie felt the anger in her evaporate, flitting into her stomach like a swarm of butterflies. "Steven…" she murmured.

He beamed at her and offered her the sword's hilt again. "At least try it on before you say no. We here at _L'Boutique Univers_ guarantee satisfaction or your money back."

For the first time all day, Connie didn't have to try as she returned his smile in kind. She grasped Tempest Rain and knew in an instant that she had found her sword. Her body moved in tune with the weight and shape of the blade like it was part of her. She took it through a piece of kata, and the blade drew bright blue arcs in the air. Its balance was perfect, its weight an ideal match for her speed and strength.

She ended the kata breathless, not exhausted but elated. Holding the blade aloft, she said, "Don't bother wrapping it up. I'll wear it home!"

Steven clapped and whistled. "Brava! It looks great on you." His face softened, and he added, "And I know you'll take great care of it."

"I promise," she said solemnly.

Lion rose from the pink crystal of the Armory, his teeth bared and his throat bubbling with a growl.

Connie gave the cat a surprised look, and started to ask Steven about the odd behavior when something clacked above her. Looking up at the sword she held overhead, Connie saw a thick pink tendril wrapped around the blade, heedless of its razor edge. A conical gray tip topped the end of the tendril, clicking noisily against the blue steel. Then the tendril tightened, and Tempest Rain tore free of Connie's grasp, vanishing into the distant shadows of the ceiling where the tendril withdrew.

"Um, okay," Steven said, laying a hand on Lion's side as the great cat padded forward to stalk around the teens protectively. "I'm not mad, but I kinda thought that sword would last you longer. What just happened?"

Dumbstruck, Connie could only stare in shock at her empty hand, and that the thieving darkness above.


	17. Slag Mite

Connie prided herself on feeling prepared for the weirdness that came from being with the Crystal Gems. Certainly in the early days, when some stranger had trapped her in a bubble and become her best friend while they'd battled a giant glowniverous worm-monster, she could forgive herself for being overwhelmed. And yes, when her eyes had been magically healed by backwash, or when she'd nearly drowned on dry land in a battle to reclaim the ocean, she'd been unprepared. Bewildered, even. But those strange happenings had become her new normal, a normal that she now cherished, a normal that she felt ready to face, knowing what to expect.

That new normal had not, however, prepared her for the idea of a ceiling to steal the new sword she had fallen in love with only moments ago. And yet, there she stood, sword-less and trying to construct a new-new normal for herself that could gauge the trustworthiness of ceilings going forward.

Lion rose to glower at the ceiling. White fangs flashing, he roared, and the sound became a pulse of energy that pounded the stone above. The whole cave shook with the force of his echoing voice.

A shower of pebbles fell out of the darkness, forcing Connie to Steven's side as he manifested a shield into a makeshift umbrella. Through the fading echo and the steady patter of stone on shield, Connie heard a crack thundering through thick rock. Looking up, she shrank in horror as she watched stalactites break free of the ceiling. "Steven!" she screamed.

Steven dragged her into Lion's side, and a pink bubble shield enveloped all three of them. He summoned another shield to his off hand for good measure, putting it between them and the hail of stone spears.

The stalactites exploded into jagged shrapnel as they struck the Armory. Connie winced as their barrier rippled beneath an onslaught of stone. Their bubble wobbled, bowed inward, but held, and resumed its shape as the last of the stalactites hammered into the crystal alloy. Somehow, the final fallen stalactite kept its shape, landing on its side with a tremendous thunk that shook the Armory beneath them.

As the stone rain abated, Steven let his bubble evaporate, and dismissed his shields with a motion. He took a cautious step toward the lone intact stalactite, each step grinding against the rubble underfoot. "Guess you really 'brought down the house,' huh, Lion?" he said.

Connie straightened, feeling silly for flinching. What was ducking going to do to protect her that Steven's shields couldn't? She tucked the self-recrimination into her half-hollow to keep her voice light as she said, "That is one tough stalactite. None of the other ones survived the fall."

"Now that it's on the ground, isn't it a stalagmite?" Steven said cheekily.

Lion brushed past the two teens, advancing on the conical stone shaft. A low growl rumbled through the cat as his mane puffed and his tail bristled. His predatory crouch put Connie back on her guard, and she looked around, trying to find whatever could put a five hundred pound predator into such a tizzy. With her senses on alert, she was nearly ready when the fallen stalactite, now a stalagmite, stood up, forcing her to find a new-new-new normal on the fly.

Rough lines snapped along the conical stone's length with a sound like a gunshot. The lines came together into four long segments of stone that pushed free from the rest of the stalagmite, bleeding gravel as they unfurled into segmented limb. Extending outward from the cone, the limbs bent, spider-like, and pushed the stone off the floor, swinging the tip upward and lifting the base of the stalagmite off the floor. Only the outsides of the legs were rocky, like armor plating made from chunks of the cavern itself. The body underneath the rock and the inside of the legs were made of some dark, glossy, vaguely reflective material.

Lion crouched and arched his back at the stone monster's rising. His roar shook the cavern again, knocking more loose stone from the ceiling. Connie flinched again, flashing a terrified look above, expecting to see another stalactite hurtling toward her, but it was only dust and pebbles spilling over them.

The stalagmite reared back on its spider legs, tipping its base toward Lion, revealing more reflecting innards under the rim of its broken base. The center of the base irised open, spilling a red glow across the floor of the Armory as it revealed a well of deep, roiling red-white liquid heat. Sharp teeth lined the inner edge of the well, spreading wide as the mouth answered Lion's roar with its own shrill, shrieking noise.

Steven re-summoned his shield and squared off against the creature. His other hand reached for Connie seemingly on reflex, and she took it without thinking. Pink light flared under his shirt, and his touch prickled in hers as she braced herself to become part of someone else.

Nothing happened.

Shock gave way to exasperation as Connie pulled her hand out of Steven's. Part of her had hoped that the need of battle might bring Stevonnie back into the world. But Stevonnie hadn't been born out of combat, and expecting the fusion to work just because of a fight made her feel that much worse that it hadn't happened. She stuffed her disappointment and frustration into her half-hollow, feeling them join the nasty snarl inside of it.

She tried to play off the fusion failure, grinning to allay Steven's worried look before she rushed past him. "Guess I can't be picky anymore," she quipped. Jumping through the cloud of floating weapons, she landed with a longsword in her grasp, her sneakers skittering into a ready stance atop the rubble.

Lion circle the spidery creature, and then pounced. With the big cat for scale, the creature looked a little less intimidating, standing only a little bit taller than Lion, and only then thanks to its spindly tip. Lion bared his fangs and loosed his claws, falling upon the creature in a storm of sharp points. Little chunks of gravel jetted out from under Lion's claws, but the creature didn't seem to care. Try as the cat might, he couldn't pierce the stone skin of the stalagmite or work his jaws around its curve, only managing to scrape thin lines into its body with the attempt.

The tip of the creature sprang upwards, driven out from the body atop a thick column of pinkish material. Connie recognized the extension and its stone tip as the thing that had ripped Tempest Rain out of her grasp. Even as her brain connected to the moment before, the tendril lashed out, knocking Lion across the floor to land in a heap next to Steven.

As it tilted back again, the creature's scream withered into a cough, and its glowing mouth flared. Something red and bright arced from the mouth and struck the Armory near Lion, forcing him back to avoid the splash. The substance hissed and darkened quickly, hardening into a blob that glistened under the Armory's light.

"She's got a tongue on her head and a mouth in her butt," Steven said, grimacing as he eased Lion back with a hand on the cat's side. "No wonder she's so angry."

"So it is a corruption, right?" Connie said, sidling next to Steven. Together, they watched the stone creature skitter away from them, its interest captured by the cloud of swords instead.

"She must be," he agreed, "but I don't see her gemstone. And her outside looks like it's made out of actual rock. You think she was buried when she re-formed her body?"

The creature's stone-tipped tongue extended once more and wrapped around the skull-and-crossbones cutlass that Connie had rejected before. Yanking it out of the air, the creature brought the cutlass down to her under-mouth and stuffed the blade inside, chewing noisily. The sound of breaking metal filled the air, then subsided into burbling as the creature digested her meal.

"Hey!" Steven cried. "We weren't done with those!"

"She couldn't have just formed inside of the rock, could she?" Connie touched Jade's gemstone through her sweater, remembering that first day when she thought the Gem might explode out of her as she reconstituted. Then, looking up, Connie realized the answer. "She was already formed! She wanted the stuff inside the Armory, so she waited here for thousands of years. The natural condensation formed a stalactite around her because she wouldn't move!"

Steven's wide eyes swiveled from the ceiling to the creature. "She wanted all of Mom's stuff, so she waited that long? But why didn't she grab it when we came before? Wouldn't she have woken up the first time?"

"Spoken like somebody who's never hit the snooze button on a school day," Connie retorted.

Steven toed the lump that the creature had spat, then jerked his foot back with a hiss. "It's still molten! I think this is the metal she's been eating. She just chews it up and spits it out?"

Icy comprehension gripped Connie's stomach as she connected the events before and after the creature's emergence. She looked again at the cooling wad of metal the creature had spat at them. It might have been her imagination, but she thought she could see little swirls of blue in the chalky gray metal. "She **ate** Tempest Rain?" she cried. "She ate my sword! And she just spit it out as slag!"

"I guess that makes her a Slag Mite instead of a stalagmite," Steven said.

The creature probed for another meal, finding a gladius. It sucked the weapon into its bottom and began to chew, its tongue already on the prowl for the next bite.

"Those aren't yours!" Connie cried. Lifting her longsword, she ran at the corruption. Her sneakers pounded the Armory's iridescent face, resounding like a war drum as she tilted into a full charge. Her focus narrowed until the world became exquisitely simple: there was just her, the sword in her hands, and the foe before her.

Anger and frustration lanced out of her half-hollow and reached all the way to her fingertips and toes, filling her with Gem strength. The longsword became a silver arc in her grasp, sweeping through the creature's leg, and she felt a satisfying thud as her run carried her beyond her target. She spun atop the rubble to witness her grim handiwork, a fierce grin cutting across her face.

The Slag Mite hadn't even noticed the attack. Her attention went to a freshly broken blade that clattered beneath her. Using her sweeping tongue, the Mite scooped up the broken blade and chomped it into her under-mouth.

Connie stared in disbelief at the utter dearth of injury to her foe, and then down at the stub of a sword in her hands. The blade had broken cleanly off of its crossguard, leaving her with an ornate pommel and an empty hilt. Medieval craftwork evidently hadn't anticipated Gem combat. "Ugh!" she snarled.

The stone tip of the Mite's tongue slapped her hands, knocking the hilt out of her grasp, and then knocked Connie off her feet with a lazy backswing.

Steven was at her side before she had landed. He puffed breathlessly from his run as he'd chased her across the floor. He manifested a shield to protect them both, but the Slag Mite had already returned her attention to consuming the array of floating swords, pausing briefly to gobble up the hilt of the longsword.

"She's pretty focused on her next meal. Guess thousands of years can make you snack-y," Steven said as he helped Connie to her feet.

The crunch of the Mite gobbling up an oversized kukri made Connie's insides seethe. "We can't just let her eat them!" Connie insisted.

As she spoke, she saw a green glow crease the bottom of her vision, and she felt her sweater suddenly grow too tight. She reached under the hem and yanked out Jade's sailcloth. But her irritation quickly turned, becoming inspiration as she looked down at the fabric draped from her fist.

Grabbing the top two corners of the cloth, Connie lifted the edge of the sailcloth beneath her chin. Then she ran, heedless of Steven's alarmed cry behind her. She let the breadth of the cloth drape back against her with the force of her momentum. Drifting from side to side, she ran until the floating swords formed a straight line ahead of her. Then she jumped.

The Slag Mite's tongue reached for another blade as Connie sailed through the cloud. _Thump! Thump!_ One by one, the swords hammered against Connie's chest with the cloth between as she sailed over the Armory floor. She had leapt as hard as she could, hoping to gather a few of the swords in her arms before landing, never dreaming that she could save them all. Yet somehow, impossibly, her leap carried her through the entire line to the last sword, which clattered with the rest inside her makeshift cloth net.

When her soles touched floor, she crossed the sailcloth corners up to her shoulders, wrapping the blades inside to create a bundle. She staggered at the weight hugged to her chest and spun, checking to see the Slag Mite's reaction. Then her eyes went wide and she kept spinning, lurching into a full run with the Slag Mite skittering on her heels, under-mouth snapping with fury at the thief who had stolen her meal.

"Connie!" Steven cried. "Serpentine!"

She could barely hear him running after them over the clattering of the Mite's pursuit. Those stony spider feet hammered the floor like a drumroll, and Connie imagined she could feel the heat of the creature's mouth burning the ends of her trailing hair.

With the edge of the Armory looming closer with every step, Connie readied herself for another jump into the murky shallows below. But before she could make the leap, she saw a blur of pink sweeping over the cave floor, and she staggered backwards to avoid the spray as Lion skidded overtop the water. The cat's roar coalesced into another wave of light that spun Connie, narrowly missing her to slam into the Slag Mite. The Mite tumbled backward and bounced across the width of the Armory. Her scream vanished behind the echoing roar and another rain of pebbles from above that shook the entire mountain.

Steven rolled out of the way of the Mite as it tumbled, narrowly avoiding his end beneath its crash beyond the opposite end of the Armory. Then he rolled again to avoid a smaller stalactite that broke free and pounded the alloy next to him. "Lion, stop!" he wailed. "You're gonna bring the house down for real this time!"

Lion grumbled, but held his volume as he climbed the Armory and poised himself to shield Connie from the pebble rain. His dark eyes locked onto the Mite as she hauled herself out of the shallows, heaving her bulk back onto her spidery legs.

As Steven circled around Lion to join her, Connie laid her bundle across the ground, smooth out the sail beneath it. "I was hoping you'd have more time to pick out your new sword. And, y'know, less imminent danger," Steven said, panting. "Which one will it be?"

Connie stared down at the pile of ancient blades. Each one was a treasure, an artifact of history and, more importantly, a gift from the mother Steven had never known. But Connie knew that none of them had the strength needed to pierce the Slag Mite's rocky hide. Even the lost sword of Rose Quartz might have balked at cutting through solid rock, and none of the other blades were nearly so well crafted.

She needed a blunt instrument. One of those hammers might have done the trick, but she doubted the Mite would give Steven the time to call them back from the Armory. Already, the creature gathered herself for another charge, coughing up a fresh metal wad to hurl at them.

At least nothing inside the Armory had suffered any damage. As her hands brushed past the edge of the sailcloth, Connie had to marvel at the perfect surface underneath the scattered rubble around them. The glowing alloy hadn't suffered a single scratch or dent in all of the commotion.

And just like that, Connie knew how to beat the Slag Mite. She looked up at Steven, grimacing apologetically. "All of them? Sorry."

A flash of surprise crossed his face before he hardened with resolve. "What's the plan?" he said.

Chewing on her lip, Connie pulled at the edge of the sailcloth. "I might not have one, really. What I have in mind won't work with this thing being so small—"

Even as she said it, the edges of the sailcloth fluttered, chasing her and Steven back a step. As Connie watched, the sides of the sailcloth unfurled from beneath it, revealing new corners that had seemingly been folded underneath. And before those new corners settled, the new sides of the cloth unfurled again in the same way, producing new corners that fluttered onto the Armory floor. Like origami in reverse, the sheet had unfolded itself to become eight times its original size.

Connie blinked. She hadn't even realized the sheet was folded when she'd first manifested it. As she touched it again, the sheet felt just as thick as it had before. She wanted to know from where these new corners had unfolded themselves, but there wasn't time to wonder such things at the moment.

"Um, okay," she said, stepping to the new edge of the cloth. "Lion, let it through. Steven, stick close. Step in if it looks like I'm dying or whatever."

His shield manifested as Steven bent low, backing out of arm's reach. "I'll probably step in before that starts happening," he said.

"Not sure if this is the kind of plan with a lot of room between 'dead' and 'winning,' but we'll stay positive," Connie muttered, and crouched at the sailcloth's edge.

The Armory quaked as the Slag Mite scurried forward. A drizzle of smelted metals trailed behind her, and her tongue lashed wildly in front of her, knocking the stalactite cap against the floor in search of her missing meal.

Against every instinct screaming for her to run, Connie held her ground. She shook the cloth by its edge, jiggling the sword pile enticingly. The rattle of swords spurred the Slag Mite into dashing straight into Connie's waiting trap.

Metal screeched on metal as the Slag Mite stopped, poising her under-mouth above the pile. Her tongue clacked against the tangle of blades. At last satisfied, the Slag Mite snatched up a rose-tipped epée and devoured it. Connie let the crunching noises cover her footfalls as she crept and gathered each of the sailcloth's nearest corners. Then, as the Mite crunched greedily on more precious heirlooms, Connie gathered herself low, and jumped.

With the sail's corners balled in her fists, Connie held her breath, hoping her jump would be enough. Her body arched backwards to roll above the top of the rocky corruption, treating it like the bar in a deadly track-and-field high jump, a bar that could crush her with its body or immolate her with its barf. The writing tongue at the top lashed close, terrifyingly close, but she cleared it with a hair's breadth to spare.

She landed hard on the other side of the corruption, still clinging to the sail, which billowed over the top of the Mite. Before the creature could realize what had happened, Connie scrambled for the other two corners of the sail. With all four corners in hand, Connie wrenched her whole body around, yanking as hard as she could, jerking the Mite off her feet and trapping the corruption inside an enormous makeshift bindle made from sailcloth.

Connie kept twisting, her sneakers skittering against the rubble-strewn Armory as she tried to swing the bindle into motion. _Gem strength, Gem strength, Gem strength!_ she screamed inside of herself. Her half-hollow spilled lightning into her arms and legs, turning her human body into an engine of pure strength. Slowly, impossibly, the bindle began to slide across the floor.

But it would not swing. No matter how she pulled, or cursed, the cloth never left the floor. Its prisoner writhed and screamed inside the fabric, thrashing until one of those spidery legs slipped through a gap in the bindle. Then another leg slipped free. And another. The craggy limbs flailed, hammering against the floor, pushing back against Connie's pull.

Sweat rolled down Connie's face like tears. "I…can't…!" she strained, feeling her body twist to the breaking point, a bowstring about to fray and snap.

Strong hands brushed over hers. She looked up to find Steven next to her, wrapping his fists around the bundled fabric just above where she gripped it. His shoulder pressed against hers as they stood side-by-side. "We can," he told her. And he pulled.

Feeling Steven beside her sent a surge through Connie. Her feet moved with his, and his body swung around to stay with her. Even without Stevonnie, Connie and Steven knew how to move as one.

Rock screeched on metal as the creature's legs slipped free of the floor, and the bindle dragged the Slag Mite screaming across the Armory. Stepping in time, the teens spun the tremendous impromptu sack, clutching tightly to the corners, rotating around the point where their hips met side-by-side. As they gathered dizzying momentum, the bindle actually lifted off the ground with the creature still inside, pinned in her cloth prison by sheer centripetal acceleration.

Wordlessly, Connie guided their combined hold on the cloth even higher. The room blurred around them, the air whistling in her ears. She lifted their arms higher, higher. A scream resounded deep in her chest, shaking her all the way to Jade's gemstone. Then she swung the bindle up and over their heads and brought its momentum to crash into the Armory floor.

A crystalline sound gonged throughout the cavern, so loud that it knocked the two teens off their feet and loosed the fabric from their grasp. Connie scrambled backwards and jumped to her feet with her fists raised and her ears ringing. Panting, shaking, she watched the lumpy fabric before them for any signs of fight. But the green sailcloth remained silent and still.

Steven crawled forward to pull away the green shroud. He yelped and jerked back as steam belched up from the opening. The fabric draped to one side, revealing a glob of pinkish-white ooze resting in a nest of broken stone. It was the metal the Slag Mite had eaten, now absent a body to contain it.

Through the glare and shimmering heat that rose out of the remains, Connie saw a silver egg-shaped gemstone as big as her fist bobbing in the middle of the slag. A thatch of half-digested hilts and blades encircled the stone, rapidly cooling into solidity.

Steven cringed at the mass around the stone. "No bubbling her from that. But at least she can't reform in there. Now, how do we get her home?"

The answer came in the form of a pink halo of fur that engulfed Connie from behind. Lion had perched himself behind her to leer at their vanquished foe and claim Connie as his protectee, pressing his chest to her back. He ran his rough tongue through her hair, grooming out the bits of stone wedged in it while she and Steven shared a look.

* * *

Working together, Connie and Steven heaved the cold metal lump out of Lion's glowing mane and onto the floor of the Burning Room. It clattered loudly before settling onto its flattest side with the egg-shaped gemstone peeking out of the lumpy nest of hilts.

As soon as their work was done, Lion stood and strutted imperiously to the lava pool at the center of the room. He thumped onto the floor with his body pressed along one of the room's glowing veins. From what Connie could tell, Lion had fallen asleep before he even landed.

Steven wiped his brow as he stared down at the silver stone wedged in the metal. "Not your standard bubble, but at least she'll be safe here for now."

Connie barely nodded in reply. Her eyes were fixed in the lump, her stomach twisting as she recognized the half-melted grip and guard of Tempest Rain inside the mass. "Sorry about your mom's swords," she said. "I wish there was a way we could fix them somehow…"

"The only person I know who could fix any of them is already in here. And she won't be excited to do me any favors anytime soon."

The rough quality of his voice made Connie look up, and she followed his gaze to a pink bubble floating among the multicolored array of bubbles overhead. A stepped pyramid stone hung inside the bubble, its iridescent colors visible even through the pink barrier. Connie had never seen the stone before, but she knew its Gem by reputation.

Bismuth.

The story Steven had told her burbled up from her memory in pieces: Bismuth, the zealot who wanted to shatter every loyalist alive and end the war on top of a mountain of shards; Bismuth, who had been bubbled away, her absence hidden by Rose Quartz's lie; Bismuth, who had been poofed by Steven and locked away again, this time by the other Crystal Gems.

But one piece of the memory loomed larger than any other: Bismuth, blacksmith, the finest weapon-maker to ever walk the planet, and the one who had made Rose's lost sword.

"Connie?"

She shook herself out of her reverie and looked back at Steven. However long she had been staring at the bubble, she could tell by his expression that it had been too long. "Huh?"

He chewed on his bottom lip, his eyes flicking to and fro with uncertainty. Finally, hesitantly, he said, "Your plans—our plans—need to have a lot more room between 'winning' and 'dead.' "

Connie hurried to laugh. "Oh, that? I was just trying to sound cool. Guess I need more practice."

He grinned, relieved. "Maybe we can think of some cool one-liners over lunch. C'mon."

As she followed him out, she couldn't resist one last look back at the slagged weapons, and then up at the imprisoned swordsmith above it.


	18. Intern! Dishes!

On a lark, Connie took her morning run up the hill instead of around the beach. She felt anxious to explore the rest of the town, since almost all of her time in it had been spent at or around Steven's home. Everything that lay beyond the reach of the boardwalk and the shore was still a mystery to her, one she felt eager to unravel.

And after the fifteen minutes it had taken her to realize that the boardwalk and the beach were the only things of note in the town, she still resolved to have a nice run around its edge, just to say that she had.

The emptiness of the streets felt different than it had in the winter before. Tourist season had come at last, and the peace of the town now possessed an edge of anticipation just below the surface. Soon Beach City would become overwhelmed by dozens, perhaps even scores, of tourists eager to splash in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Ahead of these moderate throngs, the town's attractions began spooling up to receive them.

Circling the entire town didn't take long, but Connie made the most of it. She wasn't even breathing hard when she got to wave good morning to Greg Universe as he set up his car wash. She felt the hill's full fury as she ran past the amusement park's entrance and saw Mister Smiley rolling up the shutters from the ticket booth windows. By the Visitor's Center, she let herself loose, sprinting full past Mayor Dewey as the sunburnt politician arranged and rearranged a display of tourism pamphlets. Finally, she loped into her cooldown, passing by Funland Arcade, where Mister Smiley stooped behind the _Manse Manse Elocution_ machine, booting up the popular highfalutin articulation game for its busy day.

Silently Connie made note to ask Mister Smiley for tips on improving her speed when she introduced herself properly.

A stitch burned across her ribs as she slowed to a jog. She savored the ache, grinning against the breeze that rolled past her on her way back to the house. The runner's high filled her with a personalized version of that anticipation she could feel in the city. She was healthy, free, and full of glorious summer. No matter her swordlessness, no matter her power incontinence, she felt for the first time in weeks like she could conquer the strangeness that had overwhelmed her life.

And so, naturally, Jade's sailcloth chose that moment of confidence to leap out of its gemstone home. Billowing out from all four rounded corners of the stone, the sailcloth glomped her, wrapping everything from her knees to her scalp in metallic green blindness.

Connie staggered and jerked the sailcloth out of her face. With a frustrated snarl, she tossed the cloth and tried to resume her jog. But a sudden gust of wind caught the sailcloth, flapping it back into her from behind. She nearly spilled onto the pavement trying to wrestle herself out of the clingy fabric again.

A sudden, thunderous _hooonk_ shook her to her bones. Connie screamed and yanked the cloth away to see a big box truck stopped right in front of her, waiting to pull out of the little lot behind Fish Stew Pizza as soon as the distracted jogger moved out of its way. Hurriedly Connie stumbled to one side and waved an apology to the driver, which he ignored as his truck lurched onto the street.

She held up the sailcloth, glaring at it through the thick cloud of exhaust left in the truck's wake. "Ooh, you stupid…! I could have been killed!" she snarled, and threw the cloth as hard as she could.

It could have been the post-terror adrenaline rush, or the anger pounding in her veins, or some playfulness of the wind that Jade had never mentioned. Whatever the cause, it made the sailcloth rocket out of her hand, riding the wind like a rocket across the parking lot, where it slammed into a stack of cardboard boxes at the curb. The sail hit the top box like a comet, and a plume of white paper gore exploded, filling the air with fluffy shreds that danced in the breeze.

Connie walked numbly through the paper snowfall, gaping in horror at the destruction her cloth missile had wrought. The shreds clung to her sweatiness, sticking in her hair, framing an itchy halo around her.

"What happened?!"

The hysterical shout turned her head toward the open door at the back of Fish Stew Pizza. A man's frame filled the doorway, clothed behind a spotless white apron, and topped with a tall, tight knot of hair. Connie recognized him by reputation alone as Kofi, the pizza parlor's owner and Kiki's and Jenny's father. Her daze brain connected the open door, the stack of cardboard boxes, and the departing delivery truck, magnifying her horror to apoplectic levels.

He clasped his hands to his face, eyes wide through the snowy paper whorling in the air between them. "My napkins!" Kofi shrieked. Then his eyes narrowed on Connie, the lone survivor of the massacre. "You! You did this! Who are you?" he demanded.

The distance between Connie's brain and her mouth suddenly felt like a million miles. "I…I…I…" she stammered.

"Are you a corporate spy? One of those thugs from Original Famous Original Ray's, jealous of our superior recipe?" Kofi snarled. "You're here to steal our secret formula! To sabotage us! You plan to leave our customers' hands too messy to use their telephones to give us good reviews, don't you? Admit it!"

"What? No! I—"

His eyes narrowed, piercing the flotsam that clung to her. "Wait, I know you! You're Steven's friend!" His gaze flicked a few inches lower to the hollow of her throat. "You are also one of those bejeweled hooligans? Those, those…Bejeweligans! That is the last thing we need: another reckless super-powered menace tearing apart other people's property!"

She clutched the stone at her throat. "It's not—"

Kofi stamped his foot and jabbed at the twisted husk of cardboard that had formerly held several thousand pristine napkins. "Do you have any idea how much that box costs?" he demanded.

"H-H-H-How much?" squeaked Connie.

The number burst from his lips like a teakettle's whistle, and Connie felt the blood drain from her face. It wasn't an impossible amount of money, or even an unthinkable amount of money. But it far exceeded the week's allowance her parents had Cashmore'd into her account.

"You will reimburse this catastrophe," Kofi insisted, "or I will ban that whole house from ever seeing a single slice of pizza in this town ever again!"

"I…have pirate treasure?" Connie said. "Just let me call my—"

"No!" he exploded. "No more bejeweled shenanigans! Bejeweligans! You are all banned for life! My life, your life, and especially the lives of those colorful wrecking balls taking care of Steven! Forever!"

"No, wait!" Connie cried, reaching for him as he stormed back toward the door. The thought of a pizza-less summer was horrible enough, but to think of Steven enduring a pizza-less life? In her mind's eye she could already see him withering away to nothing without the joy and sustenance his body required from the world's most perfect food. "Please, don't ban us! I'll make this right, I promise. I'll do anything!"

She swallowed hard as she watched Kofi turn back, his face calculating the word _anything_ with its sinister smile.

* * *

The last of the tomato sauce fell into place with a satisfying thunk. Connie wiped her brow and pushed off her knees to stand back and admire her handiwork. "All done!" she announced.

Kiki collected the empty box from Connie, breaking it down and folding it with the offhandedness of someone who had done that same job a thousand times before. "Hey, not bad," she said, appraising the dry good shelf of their tiny kitchen. "Labels are out and everything. And did you reorganize?"

Connie ducked her head at the mild praise. "Not reorganized. I just stacked everything pretty much where it was so it wasn't mixed up or buried anymore."

"Look, Daddy," Kiki called out, "now you don't have to dig to get at the tomato paste anymore."

Kofi didn't even turn his head. With dual ladles, he sauced a row of flattened pizza doughs. "Anything can be done well if you take forever to do it.

Connie cringed at the dismissal. But when she noticed Kiki rolling her eyes, she felt a little better.

"Mother! I need new sauce!" Kofi bellowed. His ladles clattered into an empty pot.

"No need to shout, Kofi," said the tiny woman scrubbing dishes at the sink. She'd introduced herself to Connie as Nanefua in the half a second they'd had before Kofi had ushered Connie to the shelf to unload the surviving cardboard boxes. "My ears are clear. My sink is a different story."

"Intern!" Kofi barked. "Dishes! Mother has more important things to do."

As Connie traded places with the old woman at the stool, Nanefua leaned close and whispered, "Don't scrub too hard. Once I left my hands in the water for too long, and they've been prune-y ever since." She held up her wrinkled fingers and winked.

Connie stifled her giggle before Kofi could glare at her. Her mirth didn't last long, however, as she gulped at the sight of the mountainous dish pile waiting next to the sink.

The world became a rush of work. Seconds, minutes, and hours all blurred together into an unceasing blob of activity demarcated only by the next dish to be washed. Connie felt like she was sprinting to keep up with the pace of the kitchen, but as fast as she could clean the plates and run them through the steam sanitizer machine, there were more hungry tourists coming in to replace those clean dishes with twice as many dirty ones.

At some point, Kiki stopped her working to offer her a bandana. Connie accepted gratefully, realizing how pathetic she must have looked with suds and sweat dripping from her face.

It gave her a chance to appreciate just how insane the lunch rush had become in the short time since she'd arrived. There seemed to be no end to people coming in, eating, talking, laughing, and leaving. Like a tide, people would move out and move in seamlessly.

But for as hard as Connie worked to keep up with it all, she couldn't help but admire the Pizza family's clockwork proficiency at handling all of the chaos. Kofi and Nanefua worked the ovens and counters, turning cold balls of dough from the walk-in and cans of tomato products into steaming, mouth-watering pies. Kiki handled the tables and the register, somehow keeping track of which customers were new, which had orders ready, and which were waiting to pay. And Jenny ran garbage and deliveries, flitting through the kitchen too quickly to notice until she was already gone with a new stack to take to the boardwalk.

Kofi especially caught Connie's attention. From the corner of her eye, she watched him conduct the kitchen like it was his orchestra, and his fearsome voice, his baton. "Sauce! Sausage! Trash! Oven! Order up!" He spoke sharply, loudly, but never angrily. Well, never angrily but for one word: "INTERN!"

Some time during the blur, as her arms grew heavy and her head felt thick, she felt a gentle hand steering her out through the back door. The cool air brushed the fuzz out of her thoughts, and she savored a long, deep breath.

"You gotta pace yourself," said Jenny, the one who had pulled Connie away from the sink. She pressed a cup of cold water into Connie's hands. "Stay hydrated and take breaks."

Connie guzzled the water, only remembering to breathe once the cup ran dry. "I just want to do a good job," said Connie. Cringing, she added, "And I don't want your dad to yell at me."

Jenny smirked. "Daddy yells at everybody all the time no matter what. He's all bark and no bite." Her expression became hesitant. "Mostly bark, and just a little bite," she corrected herself.

Sagging against the building wall, Connie sighed. "I was worried he was in a bad mood because of what I did."

"Oh, he definitely is," Jenny assured her. "You ruined New Napkin Day. That's, like, his favorite day of the month."

Connie swallowed hard as Jenny skipped back to the pizza-themed car parked by the dumpster. "Another delivery run?" she asked, if only to change the subject.

"Special delivery," Jenny said with a wink. As she slid behind the wheel, she added, "Lunch is basically over now, so I'm gone. You should do the same as soon as you can. If you let him, Daddy will keep you here until you're older than Gunga."

The car backed out and pivoted out of the lot, zipping between rows of parked tourist vehicles. Connie gave the cheesy car a last wave before it disappeared up the hill.

A clatter of dishes from the kitchen broke through Connie's pleasant daze. She stopped long enough to check her phone and, for the tenth time, warn Steven from joining her to help work off her debt. If one Bejeweligan had been enough to ruin Kofi's day, she didn't want to see what it looked like if two of them managed to do worse, even by accident.

As she went back inside, Connie could see that Jenny had been right about the lunch rush. Only a few of the tables still had guests, and Kiki had already cleared the other tables of their dishes. Nanefua had resumed her spot at the sink to clean the sauce pots while Kofi packed the last of a stack of pizza boxes for delivery at the counter.

"Jenny!" Kofi barked. "Where is Jenny? We have deliveries!"

"She, um…" Connie tried to remember Jenny's advice, but her spine crumbled as Kofi's dark eyes swung upon her. "Sh-She said she had a special delivery to make."

His dagger eyes lingered on her, threatening to skewer her at the news. Finally, he whirled back around with a huff. "Special delivery? Bringing more free pizza to her lollygagging friends, you mean."

"She always buys the pizza with her tips," Nanefua said in a sing-song voice.

"And taking herself and the car away when we have deliveries!" Kofi retorted. "These pizzas are already late and cold as stone! She is going to ruin me!"

Kiki swooped behind the counter and took up the stack of piping hot boxes. Before Kofi could react, she plucked the tickets out of his hand and said, "I'll take them, Daddy!" Then she turned to leave before he could muster a new complaint, pausing only long enough to silently mouth a single word to Connie: " _RUN._ "

As Kiki slipped out the back door, Connie began formulating some excuse for herself too. But the sudden lack of argument seemed to make Kofi even angrier. He took his frustrations out on a ball of pizza dough, kneading it against the counter so hard that the entire cabinet underneath it shook with the force of his hands.

Finished with the dishes, Nanefua stepped down from her stool to find a towel. As she dried her hands, she pointedly cleared her throat.

Kofi flinched, pausing his dough in mid-pummel. Then he straightened and bellowed, "Intern! Come here!"

Connie was at his side before he finished. "Did you need me to clean something else?" she said, hoping she didn't sound as tired as she felt.

He scoffed and gestured to the counter. "Any lemur with a broom can clean. You will learn something useful." Then he left for the walk-in refrigerator, disappearing into it without further instruction.

Something bumped Connie on the back of her calves, and she looked back to find Nanefua pushing the sink footstool up behind her. Obediently she stepped up and stood at the counter. A flood of questions filled her, but she held back, waiting in attentive silence.

Kofi returned from the walk-in with two finished lumps of dough, each one a little bigger than his fist. He slapped the counter with one of the balls in front of Connie, and then did the same with the other in front of him. "Flatten that into a circle as big as a plate," he instructed her, and began doing as he said with his own dough.

Connie tried to copy his motions, finding it much more difficult to keep the dough evenly spread than Kofi made the process look. When hers was more or less like his, he showed her how to stretch the dough over her fists, working it with her knuckles until it doubled in size. She was a little disappointed that he wasn't spinning the dough in the air like she'd always seen TV chefs doing, but given how much of a mess she had made with his napkins, she could understand.

The simple task kept her spellbound as she tried to keep her dough round. So she jumped with a start as Kofi thumped a pot of sauce on the counter behind her dough. "Two ladles," he commanded, handing her the instrument in question and pointing to her dough. "Too little, and the pizza is tough. Too much, and the pizza is soup." He had already sauced his dough and covered it in cheese from a container on the counter. His hands worked a cutting board with a knife, carving a pepperoni stick into paper-thin slices while he kept his eyes on Connie's pizza.

Connie kept her shoulders tensed, waiting for him to scold her or push her aside to do the job himself. But Kofi remained unexpectedly silent as she layered her pizza with sauce and then perhaps a little too much cheese. By the time she finished, he had moved on to slicing mushrooms.

"Your pizza looks a lot better than mine," she joked, rising a tiny smile at him as she gestured to her somewhat oblong creation.

He harrumphed, looking down his nose at the praise. But for the first time all day, his voice lost its perpetual edge. "I would be out of business if I could not make a better pizza," he said.

"Where did you learn?" asked Connie. "Did you go to a culinary school?"

His knife stopped mid-mushroom, and Kofi eyed her suspiciously. Then he harrumphed again. "Children are too squirmy to sit through such a long story," he declared.

Connie lifted her own nose, copying his imperious tone. "Then it's a good thing I'm not a child. And I like long stories."

Nanefua cackled behind them as Kofi eyed Connie in disbelief. But he recovered quickly, pushing the sliced ingredients at her. "Spread evenly. Don't overlap." He produced a tin of olives and began to spread them over his own pizza. His hands moved quickly, and never twice over the same spot, dotting the pie evenly with the topping. "When I was the girls' age, I moved to Accra. I lived in a studio apartment, fighting with rats for floor space and leaving crumbs on my chest at night so the roaches would crawl over me for a blanket."

"Ew!" Connie exclaimed, grinning.

Nanefua snorted. "He saw a roach once," she said.

"It was more than once!" squalled Kofi. Then, reverently, he continued, "By day I worked as a courier, making deliveries on a bicycle I built myself. In the evenings I cleaned office buildings, scrubbing my fingers to the bone. And when I came home in the dark, I would study until dawn, reading by the light of the neon sign outside my window."

Connie's heart swelled. She could remember many a night when she had hid her reading light under the blankets to read through to dawn. "You were studying to become a pizza chef?" she asked.

Kofi took her pizza from her before she could load too many toppings onto it. Using a long wooden peel, he loaded his and her pizzas into the stacked ovens on the back wall. "A chef? No!" he said, laughing. "I was going to be a doctor!"

"Oh." Connie blinked, and then looked around the restaurant in lieu of asking the obvious question.

"But," continued Kofi, "I did live above a pizzeria. The owner would give me leftovers if I helped him clean, since I came home at the time when he closed. We used to complain about our terrible landlord together."

"When Kofi did a very good job, the owner used to slip money into the pizza boxes he gave Kofi," Nanefua said, sighing fondly. "Such a kind man, taking care of such a sour child."

"I was a sweet treasure of a boy," Kofi retorted. He drew a flat piece of cardboard from under the counter and folded it into a pizza box too fast for Connie to follow his movements. "If anything ever made me cynical, it was my upbringing."

Nanefua leaned close to Connie and said, _sotto voce_ , "Kofi is the only child ever to be born with a lemon in his mouth. And he scolded the doctor who took it from him."

"As I was saying," Kofi said pointedly to his giggling audience. Once they had settled, he continued, "I worked all day and studied all night. It was grueling, but I knew what I had to do to achieve my dream. I would attend the University of Ghana, become a doctor, open my own practice, and become a rich and famous healer."

Connie hung on tiptoe as he trailed off, his attention drifting to the countertop. As he polished the work surface with a kitchen rag, Connie exploded, "And then what?"

"Then what? Then I failed!" Kofi said, laughing again.

"…that's it?" Connie said, incredulous. "The way you built it up, I thought something huge happened, like a secret cabal of evil doctors sabotaged you, or your great-great-uncle died and willed you his secret pizza recipe."

"I was working two jobs and studying without sleep," Kofi scoffed. "My WASSCE scores were terrible, nowhere near what I needed to apply. And it would take me over a year to save up enough money to take the tests again. As soon as I saw my exam results, I wandered the city in a daze. It seemed like my entire future had collapsed in front of me."

Connie felt her stomach churn in sympathy. The thought of failing any test filled her with dread. Failing a test that would decide her future seemed too horrible to contemplate. "But you ended up okay, right?" she said.

"I don't remember much after that. I must have walked the city all day, because the next thing I remember is standing in front of the pizzeria in the dark. The owner saw me and brought me inside. He fed me and listened to me, even though I must have been talking nonsense by that time."

With no timer to tell him, Kofi opened the ovens and drew each pizza out with his peel, putting the one Connie had made into the box he'd prepared. Then he produced a pizza cutter, a broad blade as long as Connie's arm that curved out from the handles at either end.

"When I ate until I could burst, he sent me on my way with another whole box of pizza. I should have gone home. But instead, I stood outside and stared at that neon sign, his sign, that had let me study all those months. His restaurant had given me food, money, and even light to read by. It had done more for me than anyone I knew."

Nanefua cleared her throat loudly. Kofi answered with a withering look.

"The next morning I came back to the shop. As soon as I set foot on that dirty tile, I felt at balance. So I marched into the kitchen and demanded that the owner give me a job."

"Demanded?" Connie echoed in amazement.

"…politely requested," Kofi admitted.

"Begged," Nanefua said. "And when he got it, he called me in tears, he was so grateful." She ignored Kofi's indignant glare to pat her son on the arm.

Kofi cut the boxed pizza into eighths with deadly precision. Then he fiddled with the slices' placement, lifting one of them to adjust it. "I worked for him for years, learning everything he could teach me. And when he retired, I moved to America, bringing with me my mother and a new dream: to open my own restaurant and be to others what this man was to me."

"But how did you know this dream would work out? Connie said.

"I didn't. But I had balance in where I was and a clear view of where I would go. Those are the two best assets a person must have for any endeavor. When I studied to be a doctor, I lacked the balance to do it wisely. My children are little better: Jenny dreams of music, but fritters away her time; Kiki works hard for college, but has no notion of what she will do once she gets there. Vision without balance, and balance without vision."

"They are both young. They have plenty of time," Nanefua scolded him.

"Balance 'and' vision," Kofi insisted, folding the pizza box closed. "Good advice for dishwashers and joggers too." Then he offered the box to Connie.

Connie blinked, taking the box on reflex. Only then did her tired brain connect the pizza's toppings with who it was meant for. "For me? How did you know my favorite?"

"I notice Steven ordering that pie on days when I see you being dropped off at the boardwalk," Kofi said. "Now, leave. All of the health code violations you probably made just being here will cost me more than those napkins you destroyed with your blundering."

Her stomach fluttered, and she grinned. "Thank you," she said earnestly.

On her way out the door, she heard Kofi bellowing so loudly that it made everyone in the dining area jump. "But if you ever blow up my belongings again, I will make you wash dishes until your hands are worn down into stumps! And worse, I will call your parents!"

Connie grinned all the way out of the restaurant and down the hill toward the beach house. The smell of her favorite pizza, and the fact that she hadn't eaten yet that day, put a skip in her step.

But when she reached the sand, she stumbled, her stomach tugging her along faster than her tired legs could manage. A bad step took her onto her knees, and she almost lost her pizza. Worriedly, she cracked open the pizza box to make sure everything inside had survived.

The pie inside was lumpy, and its toppings uneven, just the way she had made it. And tucked underneath one of the slices was a little stack of green bills.


	19. Bilious Sigh

"Are you sure you don't want to come?" Steven asked again.

Connie shook her head and smiled up at Steven and the Gems, who stood gathered on the warp pad in front of the temple door. "I do want to come, Steven. But until I have a weapon that's tough enough to protect me, I'll just be a liability out there."

The morning sunlight streaming through the windows painted Steven's worry in hues of red and gold. "I went on missions with the Gems all the time before I got my shield," he insisted, "and I wasn't a liability. Right, guys?"

Amethyst grimaced. Pearl squirmed. Garnet became suddenly fascinated with the joists in the ceiling.

"Huh. Yeah, okay," Steven conceded. "We're gonna leave that for now and maybe unpack it sometime in the future. But if you're staying, then I should—"

"You," Connie said, stopping him before he could dismount the warp pad, "should go on patrol. Pyrite and her goons are still out there. The Gems need you." Her smile widened with reassurance.

He worried his bottom lip in his teeth. "If you're sure…" drawled Steven.

"Tell you what," Connie told him, beaming. "If I change my mind, I'll just warp out to catch up with you guys."

"But you can't—oh." Steven smiled briefly before his frown took him back. "Okay. But before we go—"

"Amethyst?" Connie said through her widest grin.

"On it!" The stocky Quartz grabbed Steven by the shoulders and lifted him bodily over her head. "Have fun being queen of the castle. Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Amethyst said as she made Steven her luggage.

"Don't do most of the things Amethyst would do either," Garnet added.

"There's-fresh-iced-tea-in-the-fridge-okay-bye!" Steven blurted as the warp tunnel swallowed them out of the world.

As soon as the last light faded from the warp pad, Connie sagged in relief. She rubbed her aching cheeks as she staggered, blank-faced, back into the living room. With a bitter snort, she realized that the best thing about being left behind was the fact that she wouldn't have to put on a brave face about it for anyone.

But then, she wasn't completely alone in the house. A mountain of pink fur napped in the middle of the floor where the morning sunbeam crawled slowly across the room. Connie made her way toward Lion, pausing briefly at the coffee table to collect the packet of origami paper she'd left there the night before.

"You have the right idea, Lion," she sighed to him, and collapsed into his flank to slide to the floor. Lion didn't seem to notice the new presence leaning against him as she let her head drop back into his fluffiness. "Just hang back, nap all day. A little tuna for lunch. Maybe I should just do that."

By the time she'd finished the thought aloud, she held a finished paper crane. Dozens of its kind now populated the house, perched on the counters and bookshelves, and even a couple dangling from the ceiling, where Amethyst had hung them with strings and tape. _Birds don't belong on the ground_ , the Quartz had explained when she'd done it.

Her eyes crossed, and she focused on the paper crane's pointy beak as it dropped against the tip of her nose. She'd made this crane from a sheet of deep green paper. "What is this, human?" the bird said in an acerbic version of Connie's voice. "Loitering? Dawdling? Oh, no, this is much worse. You are wallowing."

She sighed again. "I guess I am," she admitted.

The bird rustled its paper wings with the help of her fingers. "No one possessed of a Jade gemstone, even a pustule of liquids such as yourself, should ever stoop to wallowing. Seize the day! Be worthy of that stone!" insisted the paper crane.

Connie squeezed her eyes shut. "I'm trying, bird," she mumbled.

The paper crane pecked her nose. "Bawk! Bawk!"

She set the bird aside. Her idle hands made three more to join its flock before she gathered enough resolve to leave her pink cushion. Lion grumbled at the departure of his noisy space heater, but the sunbeam quickly filled in for what she took with her.

"Okay," she said, forcing life into her body once more. "Be a Jade. Be a Crystal Gem. You can—ulp!"

Mid-affirmation, a sudden force yanked her by the collarbone to faceplant onto the floor. She groaned and rolled over, peering underneath herself, and once the stars had faded from her eyes she found the culprit: Jade's sailcloth had poured itself out of its gemstone, and the edge had fallen underfoot before it had finished coalescing, giving Connie her chin-first landing atop the billowy green nuisance.

The pain radiating from her chin became a plunger that tamped all of her anger and frustration into her half-hollow. She wiped her mouth into a sneer as she yanked the sailcloth out from under her. "You know what? I'm glad you're here," she told the cloth, her lips peeling away from her teeth. "You and I have work to do."

With the sailcloth in tow, Connie changed into her father's old _Herculoids_ T-shirt and some running shorts. Then she took down an old shoebox from the bookshelf, one Steven had shown her to contain a wealth of treasures from his dad. Inside the box were dozens of cassette tapes inside plastic cases, each one labeled with a strip of masking tape and a title written lovingly in marker.

Her finger traced down the row of tapes and stopped on a box labeled _Mega Montage Mix Vol. III_. She plucked the tape from its box and stuffed it into the ancient boom box Steven kept next to his bed.

As the synth bassline of _Offramp to Danger Town_ by Loggy Kennins filled the house, Connie tied the sailcloth around her neck, letting it drape over one shoulder. "Let's do this!" she declared, raising her fists high.

* * *

The boombox fell silent with one final _clack_ as the mixtape reached its end. But Connie hardly noticed, too deafened by the long, agonized groan she poured into Lion's side as she slumped bodily into the slumbering cat.

Hours of work had given her zero improvement. If anything, she felt like she was going backwards. Her Gem jumps were even less impressive than her regular jumps thanks to her exhausted legs. Gem strength lasted only a few seconds at a time, proven by the dumbbells she'd tried to lift and the new divots in the wood floor where she'd been working with them. And despite her best efforts at shifting it, her shape remained its everyday boring human self, only sweatier.

Worst of all, though, were her wind powers. No matter how she pushed and pulled the air, Connie couldn't produce more than a medium gale for more than a second. Her winds wouldn't be enough to harass a kite, let alone stop a rampaging Gem warrior. The air grenades she made were as strong as ever, but she knew that squeezing the air into a medium explosion was the absolute least Jade could do at the height of her power. Compared to the hurricane blasts the Gem had done while trapped in her own stone, Connie's own efforts felt pitiful.

She rolled over, untangling herself from the only real sign of progress she had made in the last week. "What about you?" she demanded of the sailcloth. "Are you going to do anything for me? Can you make me fly? Block an axe? Can you do anything besides hold up a picnic?"

The sailcloth drooped, stubbornly unresponsive.

Connie bundled the cloth into her face and screamed, kicking her heels against the floor until she emptied herself. Then she collapsed back into the pink plush, panting, and wishing the tantrum had made her feel even a little better.

She felt stupid for having expected anything different. Why should one more morning of training suddenly fix all of the things that were wrong with her? At the end of the day, she would still be the same weak, unstable, unhelpful human, exactly who she had been at the start of the summer, and exactly who she would be tomorrow, and the next day. She had no control over these dangerous powers, and no way of protecting the people she cared about. She was even less than she used to be, now that she didn't have a sword.

As she rolled over, clutching herself in misery, her eyes fell onto the warp pad. The beautiful white crystal had always fascinated her, allowing the Gems to galivant across the world with just a handful of steps. If she wasn't so useless, she could have galivanted with them. If she could master Jade's gemstone, she could use it herself, returning to the farm, or to the strawberry battlefield, or to the Sky Arena.

Connie's misery hiccupped as she remembered the extra sabers Pearl kept up in the Arena. Her hand itched for a hilt, for the weight of a blade in her hand, if only to remind herself that she was good at something. Good for something.

Lion chuffed as she pushed to her feet again and strode to the pad, leaving the sailcloth to dissolve behind her. "Just warp to the Sky Arena," she told herself as she mounted the crystal platform. "You've been there a hundred times before. It's easy. You can do it."

Closing her eyes, she sculpted the entirety of the Arena in her mind. Her booking power summoned up every crevice, every crack and crumbling pillar, every empty seat and missing tile. She mashed the sum of it all into a single thought, which she pushed down through her feet, trying to shove it into the darkened crystal beneath her.

"Any Gem can do it," Connie said through gritted teeth. "Now warp."

Frustration crackled through her, breaking the seal on her half-hollow. Her own nasty feelings spilled out faster than she could stuff them back inside. A hard breath whistled through her teeth, and she dropped to her knees, clutching the stone at her throat as if that could stem the leak. Something tickled the back of her neck, and she realized that her hair was caught up in a breeze that circled the pad.

"Come on. Come on!" Connie snarled at herself. She tried to imagine the sludgy feelings dripping through her soles into the warp pad, willing it to get rid of her out of sheer disgust for her presence. But something else kept scattering her thoughts, pulling at her from the outside. "Work! Do something! Let me IN!" she bellowed.

A sound filled the room, chasing after the echo of Connie's shout. It wasn't the chime of the warp pad she had been hoping for, but instead a familiar _grungle-whoosh_. Her head turned at the sound, and her stomach dropped.

The temple door stood open. And beyond it lay a dark staircase bathed in a red light cast from some unseen depths.

Connie startled backwards from the door. The wind around her snapped, then died, settling her hair back over her shoulders as she stared into the darkened stairs leading downward into the temple. The stairs and the light both were familiar to her, though she had only seen them twice before. Unless this was some new chamber, she knew those stairs would lead her down into the Burning Room.

She started forward, but then hesitated. It felt strange enough to be left alone in the beach house. How wrong would it feel to go into the temple by herself? And besides that, she knew the temple held unknown dangers even to those who belonged there. Steven had been hunted by her bizarre, matrimonially-themed doppelganger in his own room. Whatever waited for Connie might not be so creepily whimsical if it decided to hunt her.

But the temple had opened its door for her. Its powers of creation might be somewhat monkey's-paw-ish, at least for Steven, but she knew the temple wasn't some hungry creature trying to lure her into its stomach. It had responded to her. That meant something. Didn't it?

She felt the round edges of Jade's gemstone, which her hand had unconsciously risen to clutch. Hesitation didn't befit a Jade, she decided. So, with her heartbeat pounding in her ears, Connie stepped from the warp pad and, with one last breath to steel herself, entered the temple.

The slap of her bare feet sounded like gunshots in the thrumming silence of the room. She lingered at the bottom step, summoning her courage before she descended to the floor of the Burning Room.

It was a different experience altogether, standing alone beneath the sea of bubbles that floated at the ceiling. She felt small beneath the sheer number of stones the Gems had collected, as though the entirety of a war she'd only known through stories was hanging over her head, just one wrong move away from popping and raining down on them to start anew.

As she wandered with her heads in the bubbled clouds, her toe thumped against something hard. She frowned down at the lumpy mass of slag she and Steven had transported from his mother's Armory. The Slag Mite's gemstone still lay trapped within, its mirror surface perfect amidst the muddy blend of metals around it.

Crouching, Connie traced the outline of a blue crossguard in the mass. The remnants of Tempest Rain made her wistful for that beautiful period of five seconds when she had once again been a useful member of the team. If only the Slag Mite hadn't eaten the sword, she might have been with the others on patrol at that very moment instead of being a magical trespasser.

Something irresistible pulled her gaze overhead. She didn't want to look. She knew no good would come from looking. But still, her eyes tilted until she looked up at the only uncorrupted gemstone being held in that room.

"Bismuth," she said, rising to glare at the pink bubble and the pyramidal stone inside of it.

 _Pyrite took you apart without even trying_ , Connie heard from somewhere overhead, in a voice that sounded very much like a paper bird she'd traded words with earlier. _She beat you at the strawberry battlefield even worse than she did at Ascension._

Connie's arms crossed against an imaginary chill in the lava-lit room. "You're lucky you never met me," she told the gemstone darkly. "I don't like people who try to kill my best friend. Except Lapis, but she's a special case. And the jury's still out on Peridot. But I definitely didn't like Jasper, and if you ever tried that again, I'd give you what we gave her."

 _She took you apart like you were nothing. Because you are nothing._

Her finger tapped nervously at her elbow, and she hugged herself even tighter. The weight of her glare made her face ache until she couldn't hold it anymore. "Then I'd tell you I was sorry," Connie continued. "I'm sorry Rose Quartz locked you away. I'm sorry you were trapped in Lion. You were angry, and dangerous, but that didn't make what she did right. And I'm sorry you're locked up now. Nobody deserves to be trapped like that, without a body."

The gemstone at her neck felt heavy.

 _You're nothing without Rose's sword. You're barely anything with it."_

"And then," Connie murmured, "I'd tell you what a good job you did, making Rose's sword. How much it meant to me. And that I'm sorry I lost it."

Rubbing her arms, Connie gave the bubble one last look. Then she shook her head, feeling silly for talking to herself. She didn't belong in the Burning Room. Resolving herself to leave, she steadied herself for the climb upstairs with a long, deep sigh.

The breath from her sigh rushed out of her with the force of a cannon shot, staggering her and yanking her hair up over her face. As she clawed the long tresses out of her eyes, she watched in horror as her hurricane sigh swept up through the room, visible most by the ripple it sent through the sea of bubbles overhead. Perfect spheres whorled together, their four colors knocking against one another, each collision ringing out like a glass chime to create a terrifying discordant crescendo that deafened the room.

Connie's heart stopped, waiting for a wave of bubbles to pop and send a nightmare hail falling upon her. But the bubbles all held, falling to silence as they all stilled.

All of them, save one. Her errant breath had caught the pink bubble above her in its wake, spinning it into a loopy path high above the floor. Like a leaf on the wind, Bismuth's gemstone flitted with alarming speed and no clear direction, content to ride the current to its end.

Jolting in horror, Connie chased after the bubble, trying to catch it, or to guess its next direction, and failing at both. "Oh, no! No, no, no, no, no!" she cried.

The bilious sigh, not content to merely persist long after Connie had lost her breath, picked up speed. The bubble caught in its grasp became a pink blur. Its long, comical loops carried it toward the far wall of the room, and to rough-hewn stone waiting to catch it. Heedless of how beautifully fragile it was, the bubble looped closer to its end, where it would surely pop.

"No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!" Connie babbled. Her fingertips craned at the bubble, as though she could reach halfway across the room to stop it. The imperiled bubble slipped further and further away with every slap of her bare feet on the stone. With nothing left to lose, and no coherent sense to stop her, Connie jumped.

Her stomach lurched as the world around her became a blur, the colors of the room smearing together. She kept her eyes fixed on the pink bubble, reaching for it with every inch she could muster, determined to do everything she could to prevent a catastrophe. When she felt her hands close around the bubble's sides, she could hardly believe it. But there was no time to celebrate with the stone wall still hurtling at them. So she flipped her body in midair, holding the bubble straight out in front of her as her back slammed into the wall.

She collapsed to the floor with the bubble held aloft. Every other part of her puddled onto the warm stone, but the bubble remained untouched, save for her tender grasp.

Groaning, Connie shambled onto her knees, using her elbows to lift herself. Her eyes watered in relief as she examined the pristine bubble and its contents. Then she looked past the bubble to the long expanse of floor, all the way to where she knew she had been standing on the far side of the lava pool when she'd jumped. In one bound, she'd crossed more than thirty feet of floor.

She had done it. She'd Gem-jumped! And she'd saved the bubble!

Connie laughed, shaking with post-adrenaline jitters. Then she bowed her head and sighed in relief.

Like the last sigh, her tiny breath emerged in an explosive gale. The wind tore the bubble from her hands and slammed it into the floor, where it popped with a single, resounding _poip_! Now freed, Bismuth's gemstone clattered across the room, falling to rest at the base of the lava pool. The stone gave a little shake, and then lifted off the stone, floating up as its surface began to glimmer

"…oh, no," Connie breathed, parting her curtain of hair to watch the gemstone rise.


End file.
